266: How To Turn Stumbling Blocks into Opportunities

Melissa [: 00:00:00

Alright, guys. Coming to you with a special episode. We're calling this the mastermind popcorn episode. We're here in Charlotte recording live with our Elevate 360 mastermind members, and we actually turned the mic back to me. We gave our mastermind members a chance to ask me some of their burning questions that they wanted to hear, and nothing was off limits. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Need some effective tactical advice that actually helps you get results and makes a real difference in your life and business? You've come to the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you're getting ready to gain serious traction in your business, rapidly multiply your income and impact, and you're ready to make it happen while living all out.

Melissa [: 00:00:49

Guys, I'm Melissa Henault, your trustworthy corporate dropout turned 6 figure business burnout turned happy and healthy CEO of a multimillion dollar online business, and you're listening to the Burnout to All Out podcast. On this show, we're serving up innovative growth strategies, simple implementation methods to put them into practice, and action stimulating inspiration tailored specifically for the modern entrepreneur. Let's dive in.

Guest [: 00:01:27

What I love about you, Melissa, you're very transparent. You show the warts and all, and I appreciate that because I think we all need that. And so you've gave a story about how your business screwed up. I wanna know how Melissa goes to the process when you personally screw up. It's not the team. It's not the whole company. It's you. What is your process? When when the shit hits the fan, you screw up.

Guest [: 00:01:52

What do you do? How do you recover? Yeah. And how do you go forward in your life?

Melissa [: 00:01:56

Yeah. So when I personally screw up in business or when I personally screw up in, like, my home life or anything in between

Guest [: 00:02:04

because that's a 360 life. 60 life. Yeah.

Melissa [: 00:02:08

Okay. So and it depends on how you define screw up. But what I will say is, for instance, with the failure in build, grow, scale, the public launch. To me, that is all the decisions that are ultimately made are from the CEO. So to me, it wasn't a team failure. On the outside looking in, I failed my team. Because I'm the one who actually agreed and approved every strategy that was put before me. So to me, that is a personal failure in business.

Melissa [: 00:02:45

So the way I look at it in the way I've worked through this over the past 2 years, and part of this comes from reflection on years years years of failures. I think it's actually how we progress is because we have to be willing to try new things and we have to be willing to fail. And so, obviously, when we didn't get the numbers we expected, and it was vastly costly, obviously, the first initial reaction is I have failed. Like, I have failed as a CEO, I have failed in these decisions. But I give myself, I always give myself 24 hours to feel and not just plow through. Like, to feel the failure, to feel the disappointment, to allow it to move through me. Same thing in January. So whole another story of of failure.

Melissa [: 00:03:35

So we had in November or October of last year, and any of my listeners who do launches know, like, October of last year, we got a cease and desist and we literally just turned our ads on. We got a cease and desist from LinkedIn that said, you can no longer use the word LinkedIn. It is a trademark term in your marketing. Well, the ads were already running. All of our materials, our programs, there was no way you could turn that off overnight. I won't get into the rabbit hole of that. We had to rebrand, we had to rename. That's a whole another conversation.

Melissa [: 00:04:06

But we made some fatal, but they weren't fatal. They were learning. It was happening for us. In January, when we came to market, we thought, naively, we've been in business for 5 years. People know our brand. If we change it to Lead Gen Academy instead of LinkedIn Academy, everybody will know it's us. We have a proven record of sales and conversions. It was like, like, 2.2% conversion.

Melissa [: 00:04:34

Every time we do a launch, we get the exact same results. So we thought, we'll just call it lead gen. And that was after being on a freight train of hypergrowth, January through December of last year, just things going up and up and up and up and up. We did our launch and missed our goal by half a1000000. Okay? Wow. Missed our goal by a half a1000000. And so I wanna go back to your question of what do you do in that moment? I failed. To me, it wasn't the team.

Melissa [: 00:05:04

It always lands on the CEO. We make the final decision of everything that comes across our desk. I'll never forget sitting on a Chase Lounge in the Ritz Carlton Spa on the 18th floor. The day after the failed launch, all the numbers came in. And I was bawling. I was so upset because here I thought this was the trajectory, this is the way it was supposed to happen. And I didn't try to skip over that part. I didn't try to make excuses.

Melissa [: 00:05:37

I didn't try to jump to action. I actually gave myself that time, literally tears coming down my face, bawling and disappointment. And then all of a sudden sheer laughter. And it's a shift in perspective. I'm sitting in the Ritz Carlton on a middle of a work week, just got a 90 minute massage and I'm crying about making a half a $1,000,000. Or you. I'm crying. And all of a sudden I started laughing and I thought 2 years ago that wasn't even the total revenue I brought in.

Melissa [: 00:06:10

So it was a shift, 2 things, shift in perspective of gratitude even when I fail. And then number 2, I am a huge proponent of when things don't go your way it is feedback for the future. And so it's a discipline after feeling through it, and I'm telling you I was massively disappointed. Then getting myself together pulling up my big girl panties the next day and started journaling, literally for a month. What are the lessons in this? What am I learning here? What can I bring forward? Why is this happening? What is this cultivating me for to hold more? And so when things don't go my way in business, and I'm gonna talk about this at the live event, I look at every aspect of that perceived failure and what was learned and what is changed and what is evolved from it. And in that practice in January, after that happened, I actually sat down and journaled every time I thought the world was coming to an end. Has anybody ever done that? Mhmm. So I thought, this is good perspective while I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Melissa [: 00:07:12

Let's reflect on all the times I thought I was shit was literally like the world was ending. 1 was when my corporate job was consolidating and I had 2 kids in diapers. And my boss told me, congratulations, you still have a job. But instead of just covering the Carolinas, you now have half the country and you will be on an airplane 4 days a week. And I remember having felt such a sense of fear and lack of control and feeling like what? The world was coming to an end. Completely. No control. Whole body going into survival mode, terrified.

Melissa [: 00:07:46

What I didn't realize was that it was actually a death of who I was, and I had to go through it for the rebirth. The death had to happen so that I could get scrappy and start thinking, shit, what can I do differently? This is not gonna work for my family and I. And had I not gone through the shit of it, I never would have thought creatively to start my own business and figure out how to get the fuck out. And so I started journaling those scenarios. My business got hacked the 1st year I was in business. You can talk to Jackie about this. I hadn't made $20,000. All my socials, bank accounts, PayPal, all of it got hacked.

Melissa [: 00:08:27

It was a disaster. We were playing whack a mole trying to, like, get it all cleared out. Again, it was a pivotal moment where I could have just quit. I hadn't made a whole lot of money yet and it was disastrous. I really wanted to go into a closet, eat a gallon of ice cream and drink a bottle of wine. And maybe I did for a couple days. But now I reflect on it, and the universe was basically it was a warning. Bitch, get your shit together before you manifest all of this money.

Melissa [: 00:08:56

Because right now, anybody can access all of this. You need a hard lesson in passwords not all being the same for everything before you run a multimillion dollar business. But in the middle of it, it was like the world was ending. And so, now that I'm a couple years in, and I know I have decades of lessons to come, I now can when build gross scale to the public was a flop, I had the experience of past failures that I actually go to immediately as my, this sounds crazy, but literally is like my blankie of like, okay, remember when you thought the world was ending and it was actually happening for you. So be patient. There is something being told to you. You are being sculpted and you are being molded for something so much bigger that you don't have the capacity to see or hold yet, But pay attention and be open to receive the lessons in what you're experiencing right now. And so that's a business practice that I take on to this day.

Melissa [: 00:10:02

When I don't meet my goal, I realize it's not my path. The journey has been written for me. This is my own personal spiritual belief. When things don't go my way or things weren't supposed to go that way, it's like, bitch, they did. What's that way? That way didn't happen. So you're getting upset about something that never manifested and never happened, and you're only upset because in your mind, you thought that you should be over there. But the reality is showing you, here is where you're supposed to be. This is where your feet are.

Melissa [: 00:10:32

These are the results you got, not what you think you should have gotten. So let's accept it at face value and move forward. So that's business. Where I feel like I have failed in my home life, some of you guys have heard this story and I think maybe I was talking with Jean about this earlier on the podcast, but I don't know if any of you guys have experienced this, like seasons of your life of, I know probably you have Ginger. We, I think we've talked about this of really burning the candle at both ends as a parent. And I was a very stressed out, unhealed Enneagram 8. For any of you guys don't know, we're bulldozers and we get shit done. Even if there's dead bodies around us, it does not matter.

Melissa [: 00:11:17

We got the goal and we got it done. And for me, given what's my past and kind of what traumas I was exposed to, what I've learned is that I've operated from a self preservation mode. And in corporate, after having kids, there was still this ferocious climbing of the ladder. For now, I see for safety, who's never safe enough. I had to be performative. And also, it's how I was seen, because that's how I was seen growing up, was performing, making good grades. And so it was the way I saw being seen, loved, and safe. And then you throw kids into the mix.

Melissa [: 00:11:55

And with an unhealed body, probably blown out adrenals. And when I say unhealed, I mean, just a lot of past inner work and shadow work that has not been done yet. God bless my husband for like, dealing with it. And I saw the way out of the life I was living by starting my own business. But like you have experienced in running your practice and launching a business, now you're less available than ever. So I went from already being working probably 60 to 80 hours a week as a corporate executive to layering on outside of that, launching another business to try to get out of the thing that was killing me. So now, I'm like, double not available, double stressed out, double triggered. I could fly at the handle for anything.

Melissa [: 00:12:41

I look back at, like, how I yelled at my kids and how quick and easy I was to just be triggered even with my husband because I was my nervous system was so dysregulated. And where I have failed, where I've recognized that I failed and how I've handled that is when I was in Bali and I went through a breath work session and it was around the inner child and inner child work. And it was really fascinating because it's amazing what healing can happen when you're in a group and you witness other people's healing and like the ripple effect it can make for you. There was a girl in the group who's like in her mid twenties, who was also doing the breath work session. And when she came out, she was in tears and talked about how as an older child and her mother remarrying, what came through in her breath work was how slighted she had felt her entire life, how differently she was treated than this younger sibling of hers. And she was clearly very emotional about it. Clearly holding this emotion in her body for decades. And as I witnessed her emotion and I witnessed her sadness, all I could think about were my 2 older children and how much my energy had impacted them as formidable little humans.

Melissa [: 00:14:00

And what an apology I needed to bring home to them, witnessing this young adult who'd never gotten that apology from her parents. And my 3rd child got the hippie Melissa that's, like, out of corporate, here I am. And that those were some of the most difficult conversations I've ever had, is to, like, look an 11 year old in the eyes and tell them that I was wrong. Tell them that I was sorry. And to tell them that I am human and that humans make mistakes and that they're gonna make mistakes too. And that I was just walk them through what it was not an excuse. It was my scenario and the stressful life I was living and how I was trying to do my best, but I recognize now how sorrowful I am. And my daughter was like, mom, it's okay.

Melissa [: 00:14:54

You were working so hard to just try to get out of corporate and take care of us. And my son was like, yeah, it was pretty fucked up. He was tough. And I think he's the one who's most affected because he's the oldest. And so having that humility and being able to check your ego at home is a practice. I've had to do the same with my husband. It's a practice to nurture those relationships and acknowledge. And it's not even necessarily that you're wrong, and this is what I try to share with my children, it's that we're human.

Melissa [: 00:15:30

And it's part of the human life, in that it also sets the expectation for them that they aren't expected to be perfect. And maybe it'll allow them to be more resilient than I was. There's a reason I had such a perfectionistic mentality my entire life, because it's how I felt loved, that I was seen and loved. And I'm not judging my parents at all. I'm just saying that was my experience. And moving forward with my kids, I'm trying to make sure they feel seen and loved even when they do the wrong thing, even when they're not their perfect selves, even when they're emotionally charged. So that's my answer.

Guest [: 00:16:08

That's a good answer. Thank you.

Melissa [: 00:16:13

Thanks guys so much for listening in on today's podcast episode. And I can't wait for you to see my upcoming guest in the next episode. You are going to love this keynote speaker. Hey, here's the deal. If you like this, please subscribe and leave a review. And you want the latest online business growth strategies and exclusive LinkedIn pro tips sent straight to your phone? Text the word update to 704-318-2285. That is text the word update to 704-318-2285. Can't wait to see you guys.

Melissa [: 00:16:54

Come find me over on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you like to hang. Cannot wait to hear how you are enjoying and applying what you're learning. You guys reach out to me over on social because I love hearing what's resonating with you. When you reach out to me and you send me those personal DMs, they really do impact the content I continue to bring forward to you. So again, come find me, melissa_henault over on Instagram, melissahenault over on LinkedIn and Facebook. Can't wait to see you guys over there.