Choose Your Own Path

Business and life come with a lot of prescribed standards for how things should be done.

But following the shoulds can lead to burnout when those paths don’t feel authentic to ourselves.

What would it be like to have the freedom to decide for yourself how you want to do life and work? How would that show up for you? What would make that accessible to you?

Tasha Booth and Erica discuss making your own choices and setting your own standards in business and life.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• How living life on your own terms shows up in your business

• Why following prescribed paths leads to burnout

• Why your launch needs to keep accessibility and inclusivity in mind

• Why Imperfect Allyship® is more than what’s noticeable on the surface

Support for Your Zone of Genius

Tasha Booth (she/her) is an agency owner, coach, and podcaster. She is the Founder & CEO of The Launch Guild - a full-service launch support agency working with established coaches and course creators with Course & Podcast Launches. Her team is over 20 members strong and works together to support their clients in being able to focus back onto their zones of genius.

Additionally, she mentors Virtual Support Pros, Launch Managers, & Agency Owners who are passionate and ready to grow their businesses while living life on their own terms, and she is the host of the How She Did That Podcast -- a podcast for Virtual Support Pros to learn business and tech tips. Tasha has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur. She has appeared as a guest speaker for various summits and podcasts, including Amy Porterfield's "Online Marketing Made Easy" and Julie Solomon’s “The Influencer Podcast.”

Freedom and Authenticity

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Tasha Booth says that one thing that is not in her bio is that she was a pastor’s wife for ten years.

She says she grew up in the church, went to a Christian college, and the year she turned thirty-three, which “was supposed to be the year that you come into your full self,” that came to be true, but not in the way she had ever expected.

“That’s been a completely different road than I thought it was going to be, but I like myself as a person so much more. And I feel like there is an authenticity to me that wasn’t there before when I felt like I had to filter a lot of what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.”

Erica says it’s a big change, particularly for Black women, who are told “who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to be,” to reclaim the permission to explore how they want to live their lives.

And that personal freedom and authenticity extend into how Tasha now runs her business. 

Tasha says that one of her goals as a business owner is being able to say yes to things that are important to her, including tending to her life and relationships, whether that was paying off debt, going out to lunch on a random Wednesday, or working from a tropical beach for a change of scenery.

“That freedom and that ability to say yes to things that are important to me and also not to have money be the primary factor of what I say yes and no to has always been really important to me.”

Set Your Own Standards

Erica notes that those kinds of freedoms don’t always feel accessible, especially to women of color. 

Tasha agrees and acknowledges that those freedoms do come with work and acknowledges that business is hard and messy, even when you’re on your laptop at the beach.

Erica adds, “I think there is a difference in being someone else’s employee and having to go through that and trying to figure out how can I reclaim something for me, versus if I work for me, I set the standards. I decide what I want to do. I decide what I want to support or the impact I want to make. And understanding that you have reclaimed the ability to set that standard versus going with the standard that was set for you.”

Tasha says she often confronts that mindset around standards with her coaching clients, who believe that they should be doing X, Y, and Z or they should launch their offers a certain way. 

“Who told you that you should, and why are you shoulding on yourself?”

She continues, “I want you to show up in your launch and in your business, authentic to you and authentic to what feels good for you. And that means figuring out what you want to say yes to and what you want to say no to, what boundaries you want to put in place, and what you want this entire picture to look like.”

Get Off the Prescribed Path

Erica adds that doing the prescribed thing “often comes with a side of burnout because people aren’t doing what feels good to them.” And this can certainly be true around launches, where there are a lot of prescriptive methods and advice.

Tasha says that’s why she and her team talk about creating stress-free launches, and why people are often surprised to hear that such a thing is even possible.

“They’re like wait; launches are always stressful, they never feel good. I’m like, but why does it have to be that way?...And I think that it goes back to thinking that they have to launch a certain way.”

She helps her clients evaluate what they want to do, how they enjoy showing up, what would feel good, what their bandwidth is, and then crafts a launch from there, rather than applying a prescribed path regardless of the person or their program.

“When you look at the framework as a list of what you have to do, instead of this is kind of the beginning of it, and now I get to mold it into exactly what makes the most sense for me, that’s when we lose ourselves in the launch and end up feeling burned out.”

Accessibility Is Inclusivity

Erica asks Tasha how the shoulds and prescribed ways of doing things come up around launches in regards to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Tasha says there can be a push and pull around what people want to do and what they feel they have the capacity, financial or otherwise, to do when it comes to launching with accessibility and DEI in mind.

People can get caught between “I know that this is the right thing to do. I know this is the thing I want to do. And also, this is another expense and another thing on my list.”

Erica agrees that accessibility aids like transcripts are “one of those areas that I think can very easily for some people be written off as another expense that they can’t afford…or they just make it seem like another task that isn’t worth it to do. And what happens is that you’re inadvertently leaving behind a lot of people.”

She continues, “I think that that’s something that I wish more business, but also actual corporations or companies thought about from the top-down, because if these things were baked in more, we wouldn’t have to figure out on the backend to get plugins or other platforms to fill in the holes.”

Working and Living On Your Own Terms

In her business, Tasha says it’s important for her that “everybody feels like they are living their lives on their own terms.”

That includes flexible work schedules and unlimited time off for her team members. She also recognized that her team was hitting a midyear slump and needed time off to recharge and reset away from each other, so implemented a two-week holiday in the summer.

Erica says that is a major shift for people coming from a traditional nine to five work culture and that it can be a challenge to adjust, but “reminding ourselves that there is the permission to do that and we don’t have to dance around it and act as if we don’t have access to this…I think that’s a big piece of us really owning what’s possible.”

Tasha mentions one of her employees who struggled not to tell her whenever her schedule changed, whether she worked a bit less one day or was working through lunch on another. “It was really hard for her to get out of that mold of like, oh, I have to let somebody know.”

Erica says that those habits and thought patterns still show up for her. “It still surprises me, even though I know better. It still thinks maybe if I knock hard enough on this door, she’ll let me in.”

Tasha says she has built her business so that she can do business and life in ways that best meet her needs as a person.

She structures her days to make the best use of the hours when she feels most productive, and allows herself breaks when she’s not.

But she still fights with the inner voice that says, “if I could really sit down and hunker down for a full eight hours straight, I’d be so much more successful. And then I’m like, no, this is what works for me.”

 And she has deliberately built her business and her team to support her strengths and weaknesses.

Making Your Imperfect Allyship® Visible

Allowing business and life to co-exist extends to how Tasha uses her platform as an Imperfect Ally®.

“I think that me being an ally for [Black women] means utilizing the platform that I have and being able to amplify their voices and what’s important to them, and what feels heavy and hard for them.”

She says that, particularly in the summer of 2020, “I really used my Facebook group as a safe space to have conversations and to just be like, how’s your heart today?...Business and life co-exist, and that co-mingle, and you can’t stop your business because life is happening, but you also can’t stop your life because business is happening.”

Tasha also discusses receiving allyship herself, and what can happen when someone’s allyship doesn’t take place in public view.

She tells the story of a couple of meetings with Amy Porterfield that led to a significant amount of referral business. In the summer of 2020, a number of people called out Amy for not featuring enough people of color on her podcast or doing enough to support people of color. Tasha spoke up and said while it was true that Amy didn’t have a lot of people of color on her podcast, that she had sent thousands of dollars in referrals her way.

“I could point to fifty, to a hundred thousand dollars from her mentioning my name in rooms that I wasn’t even in, where she had stood up for me.”

She continues, “What I saw in her, in that moment, was she stepped up and said, you know what? I counted the number of people of color that I’ve had on my podcast, and I am embarrassed. And she owned that. And also I wanted people to see the other side of like, yes, she wasn’t doing this part right, but she was standing up for me and other people of color in ways that people weren’t seeing.”

Erica says it can be very easy to only consider what someone is doing very visibly in their allyship, but “I think that the reality with allyship, especially when you’re doing it imperfectly, is that there’s always room to continue to amplify it and to do more. And it is a long game, and it does take time.”

She adds, “If we’re only quantifying it with what we see on the surface, that’s a small part of the barometer of what’s happening. And you also have to remember that in order to hit that point of visibility, having it show up publicly, you have to be planting these seeds on a regular basis.”

Say Thanks

Tasha says sending someone a sincere compliment or thank you is one small action that can create lasting impact. 

“I think there are so many times where I’ll see somebody post and be like, oh that post was totally meant for me, or something small that they do, or they stand up for somebody else in the comment section of Instagram or something, and I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s awesome. And I never tell them. I never take the time to say thank you or to let them know how that impacted me. I think sometimes people just need to hear that.”

Ready to Dive Deeper?

In order to create freedom and set new standards in your business and in your life, you have to be clear on what you value and the impact you want to create. You have to be in alignment with what matters to you and why.

If you want guidancein getting explicit about what you support and to align your actions with that, join the Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/explicit.

Connect With Tasha Booth:

• TashaBooth.com

• The Launch Guild

• Instagram: @thetashabooth