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What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

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Hey everybody. I’m Shontavia Johnson, and this is another episode of the Shontavia Show, where I want to inspire you to make more income and impact using entrepreneurship. And it has been a while. I know it’s been a long time since you heard from me last, it’s been about three months and I just have to be real with y’all. It has been a rough three months and it mostly has been a rough three months because of a principle I learned about a long time ago and was reminded about recently called upper limiting. So there’s this book by Gay Hendricks called The Big Leap. And it’s a book that I’ve read multiple times, but I need to go back and remind myself about the principles of the book pretty frequently. But one of the principles in the book is this concept of upper limiting yourself. And it’s basically, self-destruction where you get to a certain level of success.

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You get to a point where you’ve got some good things happen, and then you basically do something self-destructive, or maybe not even self destructive, but you do something that stops the flow of those good things happening. And it is called upper limiting. And just to be real transparent, I feel like I’ve been upper limiting myself. Things were going really well. And the podcast was getting a ton of good interest, tons of amazing guests. And I just stopped. And I had all these excuses about why I stopped related to time. And one thing you may notice if you listen to old episodes or look at when the episodes were published, I stopped actually posting new episodes of the show right around the time virtual school started for my children. So it’s no secret. I’ve talked about it on the show. I have young children, and right now we are virtual schooling, all three of them, one of them isn’t even school aged, she’s a toddler.

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And so it has been rough. And one of the things I was doing was telling myself, you know, I don’t have time to do that because I’ve got all these other things on my plate, which was true, but it really was a symptom of a bigger problem of me, upper limiting myself and not making time. And I was, instead of using the excuse that I didn’t have time when it really was a conscious choice on my part, which was fine. I am learning to give myself grace. That’s one of the things I want to talk about on the show today. And it’s been an interesting journey. I have been doing the virtual schooling, working from home at the same time because of COVID-19 and stay at home orders and sheltering in place for the health and safety of my family and myself.

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And frankly, the past couple months, we’ve been really, really anxious about the election, the presidential election and the down-ballot election races in the United States. And so there’s been a lot going on and I just decided that I was going to prioritize myself. And I also really kind of decided that I was going to stop doing some of the things that I was doing. Like I was saying earlier, I now realize maybe some of that behavior was me getting in my own way. And I’ve talked about that a lot on my show. I talk about it a lot on my YouTube channel at shontavia.tv. I talk about it within the Brand and Business Academy, which is the training program that I’ve created, which gives an entrepreneurship formula to working professionals, especially women of color who want to start businesses. So there’s been a lot happening.

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And I think I got in my own way a little bit, and that’s just being completely transparent. I think oftentimes, you know, we talk about the really good things that happen, but we are not as transparent when things aren’t necessarily that great. And so I want to make sure I’m being transparent and that’s not to say great things haven’t happened. I’ve gotten some amazing opportunities over the past couple of months, I was invited to speak at Google to a group of students. I was quoted in an article that was written by Harvard’s journalism lab. I got an invitation to speak to the Smithsonian as part of a black innovators and entrepreneurs week. So that’s really exciting that’s happening mid-November. So there’s a lot of good stuff happening too. I just have really postponed some of the projects that I typically would devote a lot of time and energy to, like the Shontavia Show, but I am back.

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I am so excited to be back this, these next couple of episodes, and really the remainder of the episodes for 2020 are going to be amazing. I have interviewed some amazing entrepreneurs already. People like Steph Humphrey, who is a tech expert, who is a branding expert, who is a regular on Strayhan Sara and Kiki among other things. Also talked to Julia Rock interview, Latesha Byrd, just some amazing and dynamic entrepreneurs that I’m excited to share with you as we get back into the swing of things with the show. So that goes to show you, it’s not that I’ve not been working. I’ve recorded these dynamic amazing episodes with dynamic amazing entrepreneurs. We just haven’t really released them yet. So it is going to be a lot of fun from here on out. Thank you to those of you who reached out to me, who wanted to know where episodes were. I’ve got something for you.

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Just stick with me for a little while. This is the first episode, and I think about three months as I was saying before, but I will not leave you again. We are going to continue down this path. The show has been just an amazing experience for me, and I’m excited to get back into it.

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So during this entire COVID era. One of the things I’ve done is gotten back to my love of reading. And as I’ve gotten back to my love of reading, and I love reading business books, one of the things I found is that I just don’t see myself in those business books that everybody recommends. So one of the things I’ve done is created a book club for women of color entrepreneurs. And what this book club will do is help women of color deconstruct valuable lessons from the “most popular business and self-help books” while centering their own lives, their own stories and their own experiences.

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If you’re interested in joining me, you can visit shontavia.com/bookclub That’s shontavia.com/bookclub, hope to see you there.

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So one of the things I want to talk about today, really the thing I want to talk about today is surviving. So like I was saying earlier, I really feel like I was upper limiting myself because things are starting to go well. And, you know, I just exhibited a little bit of self-destructive behavior by stopping things that were going well, but simultaneously, I was surviving. We are in the middle of a global pandemic with COVID-19 right now, as of the recording of this episode, we’re in the middle of a very, very contentious post-election–and I don’t know if this is a conversation or conflict at this point–but in the U.S. Between the existing president, Donald Trump and the president elect Joe Biden. President elect Joe Biden has won enough electoral college votes to be the next president of the United States.

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But the existing president, Donald Trump is not conceding that he lost. And it has caused, frankly, for me, a lot of anxiety about what’s happening, watching the news and seeing people fight and argue in the streets and all of that has been kind of nerve wracking. And then we still alsoare in the middle of anti-racist protests and the anti-racist movement in the U.S. There are also things happening around the world related to COVID related to police brutality and injustice. Wars people being killed in conflicts between countries. And it’s been a lot. It really, really has. So I want to use this episode to talk about survival and the thing I– the things I think entrepreneurs of color, especially, but even more, especially women of color, three things that I think you can do to survive this whole season that we are in right now.

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So the first thing I think you can do is get educated. And I know just about all of my listeners are very, well-educated both formally and informally. You may have a few degrees, you may have a number of certifications or trainings or years of experience doing whatever you’re doing, or you may even be in college or graduate school or law school or whatever. But I want you to really think about where you need education right now, specifically as it relates to your ideas and your entrepreneurial endeavors. So I have taken some time to do a few things, even during these past three months, when I told you guys, I, I really kind of stopped doing some of the things that were working, but the thing that I’ve continued to do this whole year, including these past couple of months, or three months is educate myself.

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I have taken at least three courses, and it may be more actually, I think it’s more like four or five courses related to things I wanted to learn. So earlier this year I took Danielle Leslie’s Course From Scratch. And Course From Scratch is basically an educational program that teaches you how to create an online course or online programs. And I took that course because I really wanted to figure out how to create systems around the work that I was doing with individual clients. I love doing work with individual clients. I loved my clients who I was working with in the past decade or so in my business, but I wanted to figure out how to help more people, how to create systems that would allow me to do that on a bigger scale. So I took Course From Scratch to learn, how do you actually build an online course? So that was the first course.

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The second course I took was From Cash to Crypto, which is a course by Tonya Evans, who is a colleague, a business partner of mine, who is, I mean, she really is an expert in cryptocurrency. And so the most popular cryptocurrency you may have heard of is Bitcoin, though there are all types of cryptocurrencies out there, but I wanted to learn about these different types of financial systems and ways that I could participate. And I wanted to learn just what they were. If these were things I should be thinking about or not. I wanted to educate myself around that around just how to diversify my investment strategy. So I took that course from her. And then the final course I took was around creating systems in your businesses. So I mentioned, I took Danielle Leslie’s Course From Scratch to learn how to create an actual course and to Tonya Evans’s course around investment vehicles that are outside of fiat, which are traditional financial systems.

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And then I took this course about creating systems in your business, which I’m trying to remember the entrepreneur’s name. Her name is Courtney Sanders. She’s an expert in building systems in businesses. So I took that course too. And so these courses cost me a few thousand dollars, but literally y’all in all of the courses I made my money back PLUS SOME. Just implementing these educational tools that I received from these courses. So all of these courses are in the high hundreds to the low thousand dollar range. And in all of those courses, with the knowledge I took, I made money. I got a good return on my investment within maybe three weeks of taking Danielle Leslie’s course and made the money back that I spent on her course, plus a bunch, probably 30 fold at this point, what I spent on the course.

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And then From Cash to Crypto. One of the things I love about Tonya’s course, From Cash to Crypto, is it really teaches you not just what Bitcoin is, but how you can actually go about getting some, buying some. So she taught in the course how you go about buying Bitcoin. And I’m glad I did because when I started taking the course, it was about, I think one Bitcoin was about like $10,000 or so. And as we sit here today, I think it’s in the $15,000 range. So I’ve made money back consistently with the tools that I learned from Tonya’s course. And then even with the systems course from Courtney Sanders, I have made a great return on my investment just by building the systems that allow me to work hard once in my business, as I love to teach in the Brand and Business Academy building new systems that allow me to spend even less time on some of the day-to-day administrative email writing, posting online, that kind of thing.

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So I can focus more on the other pieces of the business, including my actual clients and customers. So getting educated is so, so, so important, whatever that thing is, you want to learn, learn about it. Now I’m not saying go out and spend thousands of on a class or anything. Maybe you need to do that. Maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s something as simple as subscribing to a YouTube channel and watching videos or subscribing to an email newsletter, buying some books or whatever, but survival in this time, I really believe requires that we get educated. Including getting educated about political systems and political processes, because we really are sitting in a time in history right now, where the rules are going to matter a lot and the people who understand the rules will be able to best navigate what’s happening in the United States. And frankly, around the world, just getting educated is such an important thing for entrepreneurs to do right now.

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So that’s the first thing, please, please, please get educated. That might mean taking a course. It might not mean taking a course. It might mean reading books, but please get educated. I think that will help you survive. The other thing I’ve been doing to educate myself is reading more books. So if you subscribed to my email newsletter, I’ve talked about this a bit. I’ve gotten back to my first love, which is books. I am a, I am a lover of books, a bibliophile. I love reading. I love tangible hard copies of books. I like listening to books and I’ve really gotten back into reading in 2020. And it has opened my eyes to so many different things, just doing more reading and engaging with the ideas of other people. And it’s got me thinking about how to implement those strategies and take those strategies to the next level in my own business.

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So get educated. And it’s taken my mind away from some of the things happening in the world that are distracting me from my own focuses. Now, understanding, you know, we want to be engaged citizens. You want to make sure that you’re reaching out to and helping people who need help, but oftentimes we can get so caught up in the problems of everybody else in the world that we have no control over that we don’t take care of home first, right?

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We don’t take care of the things that we want to do. We don’t pursue the ideas or the entrepreneurial endeavors. So getting educated is critical, especially right now.

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The second thing you can do to survive, and please hear me out on this one, because when I say it, I think it may sound a little funny to some of you, but the thing I think you must do to survive in this time, I said it on Instagram a little bit differently, but what I’ll say on the show at least to start is we should pursue economic independence.

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You should pursue economic independence. I should pursue economic independence. We need to be financially free so that if you are working in a job where you disagree with the way in which your company has made a stance or not made a stance against racist activity or against wrongful conduct or injustice in society, you can walk away from that without blowing up your entire life. You can have the freedom. If you have economic independence, that also means you have the freedom to say things that you might not be able to say if somebody else is signing your paycheck. So pursuing economic independence is a big one. The way I said it on Instagram was we need to get rich. And I believe that I believe we need to get rich. Entrepreneurs, especially people of color, women of color, black women who have entrepreneurial ideas, we need to get rich.

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We need to be able to cut the check for causes we support. We need to be able to have enough money so that if we do say something that a client doesn’t like, or that an employer doesn’t like, again, it doesn’t blow up our entire lives. We need to get rich.

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We need economic independence and not just for ourselves, but for the people we can help. Right? And I know this might sound a little tough right now during an era where I think 21 million people in the U.S. Are getting some type of unemployment benefits. In a time where 41% of black businesses have closed because of COVID-19. Where 25% of women-owned businesses have closed because of COVID-19. This is tough, right? Because we are living in a time that is hard for a lot of people. But, there are things we can do. There are ways that we can pursue our entrepreneurial endeavors, even though there’s so much economic instability around us.

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So I encourage you right now. If you have an entrepreneurial idea, if you have registered that LLC or incorporated that corporation, pursue that idea, I think now is one of the best times to start a business–depending on the type of business it is and the way in which you can operate that business. We’re living in a time where people are at home, where people are working from home. So we might have a little more time because of not having to make that commute or not having to do some of the day-to-day things that we typically do. So I think now is an amazing time to start a business and people are having entrepreneurial success, even in the midst of COVID. You see black women like Rachel Rodgers and King Ashley Ann Jones on Instagram, who’s a marketing expert and others, Danielle Leslie is another one, who have said during this period, their businesses have crossed a million dollars in a day.

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And so I think it’s possible for entrepreneurs to do really well right now, especially if you’re providing solutions to problems that are, are plaguing people right now. If you have a solution to a problem, especially a really good solution to a pressing problem, to a need that other people are having. I think you’re in a great position to do really well as an entrepreneur, even during this COVID era.

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And this is especially true for women of color before COVID 89% of all women owned businesses that were started last year in 2019, were started by women of color, and black women were the largest demographic within that group. So we, women of color, black women, we are entrepreneurial already. We are more entrepreneurial than any other demographic group in the United States, more than men, more than white men, more than however you want to cut the, the, the gender and racial makeup of people, women of color, and especially black women, Hispanic and Latina, Hispanic women, and Latinas too, are leading the charge as it relates to entrepreneurship in the United States.

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So pursuing economic independence is important, especially right now, as people are losing jobs, having to go back inside, if they ever left, like we basically have been inside. We haven’t left too much. But now is a great time to pursue your economic independence. Your economic freedom.

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Now is the time to get rich, which leads to my third point. You shouldn’t get necessarily want to get rich just to fatten your own pockets. You want to get rich so that you can do good in the world. And while you’re doing all these things, make sure you also give yourself some grace. Right? And so I talked a little bit about giving yourself grace earlier when I was talking about myself and these past three months being so difficult. Yes, I was upper limiting myself. Yes. I took a lot of things off of my plate.

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Yes, it is a very stressful period, but I also am learning every day how to give myself grace and say, you know what? Your best doesn’t always mean your absolute best. It means your absolute best today. And today might look different from tomorrow, which might’ve looked different from yesterday. So give yourself grace as you’re going out, making money and doing good. So what I mean by doing good doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go out and, you know, be Gandhi or Oprah Winfrey or a billionaire philanthropist, but do good, do good for other people. Maybe there are elderly people in your neighborhood who can’t go to the grocery store. You can go get groceries or order groceries and deliver them to their doorstep. Maybe it’s giving to charity, maybe it’s hashtag activism. So hashtag activism is something that gets a lot of negative vibes from folks.

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And it gets a lot of negative feedback. Like it’s not really a difference, but think about how many times companies have gone viral for doing the wrong thing and changed course. Think about how many times a person has gone viral for being racist or sexist or xenophobic and lost their job. Think about how many times hashtags have spurred movements, whether it’s the Black Lives Matter movement or Defund the Police or like Bring Back Our Girls, raising awareness and those types of things with varying levels of success, of course. But hashtag activism works. And I won’t let anybody else tell me differently. You all know I spent a lot of years as an academic, as a law professor, I still work in higher ed, and in my research, which revolved around social media, entrepreneurship, social justice, and law. What at least I found in the research is hashtag activism can work. Being engaged online can work.

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Donate to the runoff races in Georgia, help other people survive. You survive yourself, help other people survive. So I encourage you to do good, including doing good to yourself. If all you can do right now is survive, wake up every day and get the bare minimum accomplished, that is doing good, because you are no good to anybody else. If you’re not good to yourself, if you’re no good for yourself.

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So I encourage you to do these three things, get educated, pursue economic independence, and do good in the world, including doing good to yourself.

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Now I know this is a little bit of a different kind of episode for me, but I really have been thinking a lot about this as I have been figuring out the next steps for the show, for my brand and everything else.

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But survival is so important right now. Yes, we can talk about marketing and intellectual property and all those other things, but you have to survive first, right? If you want to build a business that is going to survive and the way your business is going to survive, especially as you’re just getting started, is for you to survive. So I hope these suggestions help you. I hope something I’ve said has encouraged you to do these things. Get educated, pursue economic independence, and get rich and do good in the world and be good to yourself. Give yourself some grace.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

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The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship. And I love to do this work while I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

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The Shontavia Show is a LVRG original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina .Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory.