Self-Leadership Coach Erin Baker

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you. You guys are in for a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast self leadership coach, business strategist and best selling author Erin Baker. How are you?

Erin Baker: [00:00:37] I am fabulous, even more fabulous now that I’m here talking to you, Stone.

Stone Payton: [00:00:42] Oh, I have really been looking forward to this conversation. We’re really going to be talking about this topic of joy. I got to ask right out of the box, how would you define joy and what business, if any, does it really have in business?

Erin Baker: [00:01:02] Oh, it has every business in business. So let me start with, if you ask 100 people to define joy, you’re going to get two things. You’re going to have people saying something and then going, Hmm, I’m not sure if that’s right. And you’re going to get all hundred people to say something different. That is something that I have learned through my course of talking to people all over my network, friends, family, colleagues. Joy is this word we all know. We don’t know how to define it. And really, we more so know when we’ve lost it. So what is joy is a tough question, but at the same time, as I have done this research, I have really found this fascinating thing where everybody has their own sort of unique flavor of joy. But there’s some real commonalities. And one of those things is it’s not the same thing as happiness. And we use words like joy, positivity, happiness really interchangeably. But happiness is really that thing that we think we’re going to get when we achieve a milestone, whether it’s we get a revenue goal in a business or we get promoted in a job or we buy that house, happiness is a result of something good happening to us. It’s also something that once that novelty wears off, right, we we all think once we’re going to get that promotion or that house, that we’re going to be happy forever.

Erin Baker: [00:02:34] But we know that actually. Hmm, a few days, few weeks later, that happiness has worn off. Joy, on the other hand, is not something that we need an external circumstance to feel. And you can imagine. Just imagine a time when you felt joyful and you might have been doing nothing. There’s no house, there’s no car. It’s just you’re with your family or you’re experiencing a lovely sunset or you’re just feeling in the groove in your work. And so joy is this thing that you can access any time. And it’s not a fleeting feeling the way happiness is. It’s something that you can kind of grow and cultivate over time. So I can even say to these listeners here, you know. Tap into what it feels like to feel joyful in your body. You know, I feel joyfulness really deep in my belly, whereas when I feel happiness, I feel, oh, it’s somewhere up above my head. And now imagine you can tap into that feeling of joy any moment. So that’s your first question. I know that was a long winded answer, but Joy is a very complicated thing that shouldn’t feel complicated. What does it have to do with business? Well, everything.

Erin Baker: [00:03:59] I’m going to put it to the listeners out there who have businesses. What’s the number one reason you got into business? I’m guessing it has something to do with this word Joy. Whether or not that is in your vocabulary could be freedom, could be autonomy, could be creativity, it could be independence. All of those roads lead back to the sense I want to be joyful in my work. I want to be lit up. I want to be having a good time. I want to be playing to my strengths and doing the things that matter to me. And how many people out there started their business from joy for joy, and then got into the strategies, the tactics, the revenue generation, the milestones that things that we think are going to make us happy, right? All of a sudden the joy is gone and what are we doing? We’re miserable, or maybe not miserable, but we feel like, what? What do I want to do here? So joy is everything. Because if you don’t have joy in your business, you’re not going to be there five, ten, 15 years down the line. And we know that business is hard and many businesses fail all all on their own. Can you imagine showing up miserable for years? I can’t.

Stone Payton: [00:05:18] So was there a catalytic event or was this an evolution for you? How in the the world did you start going down this this path of working with this?

Erin Baker: [00:05:31] Yeah. So I will say out front, you know, we’re talking about joy being this hard to define thing that we all kind of know when we’ve lost it. I didn’t have the word joy in my vocabulary when I started my business. And in fact, I had a friend who is all about joy. He he wants to lead the world joy movement. And this is a guy who has a smile that’s bigger than his face. And I thought, yeah, okay, that joy thing that’s for him but doesn’t resonate for me. And then I started writing a book a couple of years ago, and as I was trying to put together, well, what is it? Do I have to what is it I have to say in this world? What do I have to contribute? I started looking back at my business and I looked at I got colored pencils out and I looked at milestones, you know, when things were going well, I looked at when things weren’t going well. I looked at lessons I learned all along the way, and it took a couple of well, it took about a year to kind of come to realize that what was happening when I looked backwards was when I followed my joy, when I followed what lit me up, what was important to me when I got in touch with how I do things best was my way of doing things.

Erin Baker: [00:06:43] That’s when things got really fun and I got more successful. And it was those times where I lost the joy where I got really trapped in This is what I’m supposed to do or this is what I should do, or This is what good business owners do when I got trapped in or Here’s the goal I’m going to chase because I’ll be happy when I get there. When I got trapped in that, that’s when everything started to fizzle. And so it just was a very personal way of looking at it. And then I just started looking at other clients and other colleagues and found, wow, this is a pattern. It’s the more we can chase our joy, the more we create success. And it’s when we lose the joy that we I mean, there’s failure all the time anyway. But we, we fail more often when we let joy out, when we leak it, when we drain it from ourselves.

Stone Payton: [00:07:30] So let’s talk a little bit about the work. I love the the phrase the term self leadership coach. I don’t know that I’ve run across that before and I’ve had a chance to to visit with a lot of coaches say more about that and the practice itself.

Erin Baker: [00:07:47] Yeah so it’s both a made up term and not a made up term. So, you know, if you look at the coaching world, I’m not surprised that you have encountered probably business coaches, life coaches, executive coaches, leadership coaches, health coaches. Right. One of the wonderful things about the coaching industry, it’s also a dark side, too, but you could basically call yourself any kind of coach and somebody else has probably done the same thing too. And at the core, we’re kind of doing very similar things just in different contexts, right? Whether we’re working in a business or a corporation or working with someone’s health self leadership. So it’s sort of a made up term for a coach. But self leadership is really this idea of how do we learn to lead ourselves through the challenges, the ups and downs of running a business or, you know, it doesn’t have to be a business, it could be a leader in corporate, it could be anything. But there’s so much we have to do internally to show up in the world as leaders, as partners, as friends, as business owners internally. Leading ourselves and being able to manage the, Oh, I just failed. How do I deal with that? Or getting connected with, Wait, how do I want to do this? What’s my way of building this business or what’s my way of getting my name out there? What’s my way of coaching clients? And so it’s all about that sense of like we’re the CEO of our own life and how do we be the CEO and the leader and the manager that we don’t have, especially in business because we are. Oftentimes either the only person or we are at the top of the food chain.

Stone Payton: [00:09:30] Yeah. So so this book did it just sort of burst out of you or was it a real labor to to get it out and frame it and get it out there for folks?

Erin Baker: [00:09:44] Yeah, it’s a great question. I want to be able to tell you that it was just pure joy the whole time it came out of me. It was just perfect. No. It took me two years. And I can tell you, you know, it took me about a year before I landed on the book being about joy. I went through a bunch of different iterations before I felt like, Oh, I’m actually saying what I want to say. But the thing that was so profound is once I realized it was about joy, I said to my I had a book coach I was working with. I said, I have two requirements. One, I have to be joyful while writing it and it has to be a joyful read. And even as I put that, as the requirements, I kept losing the joy over and over and over again. And it was a lot of things like. Perfectionism. What am I saying here? How do I make it sound perfect? I’m a former academic, and so I had to really wrestle with that smart, PhD sounding person. That’s not a joyful way to read a book. And I kept hitting wall after wall of, Well, is this the structure of the book or is this the structure of the book? And what am I saying here and what am I leaving out? And so finally, after multiple iterations, it took me about six months of I kept hitting different walls for different reasons and thinking I’m just going to I’m just going to put this book away.

Erin Baker: [00:11:11] I can’t do it. My book coach and I came up with this really brilliant insight, which is every time I open Microsoft Word, my academic self was coming out and that’s when I lost the joy because I was trying to be FD and defend my ideas and it just didn’t feel fun. And so we realized that actually I love speaking. I have had my own podcasts. I love conversations one on one with people. And so my book coach said, Well, why don’t you just speak the first draft of the book into your phone? And it was brilliant. So I would pick up my phone and be in my office and I would just record these snippets. And what we also said is, if structure is bothering me, let’s break all the all the conventions of structure, just record stuff and we’ll see if a pattern emerges later. And so that’s what I did, is I would get on my phone, I’d pace around my office, I’d record something for 5 minutes, and then I swear, about a month later, I had 70,000 words, which is quite a bit. Words ready for editing and cleaning up and putting into a format. And it was so much fun because I felt like I was talking to my reader rather than, you know, often the void writing this smart academic thing.

Stone Payton: [00:12:26] What a fantastic idea. So what did you end up with? And maybe structure is not the right word, but the flow of the book.

Erin Baker: [00:12:36] Yeah. So it naturally fell into a structure and it started off with, well, let’s just define this thing called joy. What the fuck is it? And so I spent a bunch of I call them conversations instead of chapters, because they really are kind of like sitting and having coffee with me. So a bunch of conversations on, yeah, what is this thing called Joy? Why is it hard to define what are some elements of joy that we can tap into? So I really believe in curiosity, creativity, courage and connection as ways to create joy. So I went into that. Then it was, why are we? I think it was why is it so important? And then why are we afraid to put it first? So I spent a lot of time talking about the beliefs we have around pursuing joy and how hard it can be. It can feel you can feel guilty about pursuing our joy. And then I spent a real long time talking about all kinds of different ways. It sneakily leaks from us. And then finally, I had a bunch of pieces that were all around, Well, how do we get more of this thing? How do we how do we fill up on joy so that we’re, you know, even in times of, you know, uncertainty and strife, which is inevitable both in the world and in our business, is how do we have that joy tank full so we can be resilient.

Stone Payton: [00:13:53] So I think I’m hearing very clearly that your assertion is that joy really can be something we do within ten. It can actually qualify as a strategy or a set of strategies.

Erin Baker: [00:14:07] Yeah, Yes, absolutely. And and I will qualify that with that. Doesn’t mean that we throw out other strategies. Some people will come. That’s sort of one of their. Yeah. Buts. Right. Well if I put joy what about these other tried and true business strategies. Yes. We need to have plans. We have to goal set. We have to look at if we’re marketing, what are the different ways to market. And we if we’re leading teams, we need to be good leaders and we need to make smart decisions. All of that is true. But if you think about Joy as the first strategy. Think about. There are however, many billion people on this planet. I never know the exact number. I’m going to guess it’s around eight right now, but there’s that many ways to build a business. And so coming back to Joy, I can look at, let’s say. Social media is a strategy for me and I can look at how are other people doing social media. I can get some ideas and I might hear someone say, Well, this is the only way to do it if you want to convert clients. I don’t believe that’s true. I can come back to what’s my joyful way of doing it. Which of these things that I’m seeing out there as possibilities feel aligned with me and how I like to do it. Or maybe I don’t see anybody doing it the way I want to do it. How do I do it my way? So in every element of your business, if Joy is the first question, then you get a menu of different options that you can choose from and just say, which one’s the most joyful one for me, which one feels like I will feel energized, it’ll make me come alive. It suits my interests, it suits my my strengths, all of that.

Stone Payton: [00:15:49] You mentioned a moment ago maybe acquiring the joy, you’re getting it, you’re feeling it, and then somehow it just pieces of it or maybe it just sort of slips away. So you’ve seen this maybe in your own life and with your clients as well.

Erin Baker: [00:16:06] All the time. And I will I will say before I talk about some of those ways that happens, I don’t believe we ever get to a place where joy is just on all the time. That would just be a little toxic to be always joyful. And I also will say, I think you can be joyful in times of grief and sorrow. We talk about joy and sorrow going together, but the goal is not to get to I’m always joyful. Everything’s honky dory all the time. We’re going to lose joy. It’s going to happen. It’s natural. It’s human. Part of what I really believe in is learning to notice when it’s gone. Diagnosing why it has slipped away. And then what do you do to get it back? So a few things that really can sap our joy. The word should is so common in our vocabulary, right? I should do this. I should be on social media. I should be writing a weekly newsletter. I should be on radio shows. Any time we’re in a should we’re not necessarily listening to. Is that what I want to do? Is that the joyful strategy for me? And so if we’re hearing and business gurus, experts out there will tell you their way is the way. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen if you’re not on podcast, what are you doing? If you’re not on social media, what are you doing? So you get this belief, right? I have to do this.

Erin Baker: [00:17:29] The survival of my business depends on me doing this thing. Not true, but the shoulds the supposed to is that this is what a successful entrepreneur does, can really sap our joy and it can be at the high level of I have to be on social media or it could be this is how I have to do social media. I have to be on Instagram and I have to make pretty graphics and I need to you know, there’s all these rules we make up in our head. So that’s one way. The other is when we follow the blueprints, the formulas, the scripts that business experts give us, very few of those gurus have actually implemented the strategy that they’re asking us to do. It’s a bunch of marketers who’ve decided this is the this is the secret, right? Very few of them have done it. And they don’t know your unique situation, right? They don’t know who you are or what you value, how you operate, what your business is like. Just these formulas are not tailored to you. And so we lose our joy when we decide the formula that’s going to, quote unquote, guarantee success is more trustworthy than our own instincts.

Stone Payton: [00:18:41] So how does the the whole sales and marketing thing work for for someone who has a practice like you and I’ll ask in tandem, is sales and marketing joyful for you at least some of the time?

Erin Baker: [00:18:58] Yes. This is so in the coaching world, and I think this is true in in several businesses. I was just speaking to a massage therapist this morning about business. You can go anywhere from building a business that’s based of word of mouth and referral. That’s what my massage therapist friend has done. Has it marketed at all and has a very full waitlisted business. A lot of coaches do the same thing and I know coaches, I know other business owners, therapists that etc. that don’t have a website, don’t have a business card, but they’re so good at what they do that people just refer them and that’s how they’ve built their business. So when any business owner comes to me and says I have to mark it, my first question is let’s test that assumption. It might be true, it might not be, and for a lot of people. You know, they could build up by word of mouth or referral. They can do in-person networking. I have a former client who’s just a genius at building a network. And just by catching up and having virtual coffees with people, he’s been able to pivot from consulting into coaching really quickly. So again, not marketing all relationship based. Business building. So marketing doesn’t always have to be there.

Erin Baker: [00:20:27] And then with marketing, there’s so many different options in the world. There’s, you know, organic content, there’s social media, there’s podcasts and radio, there’s blogs, you can write a book, then there’s, you know, paid ads. There’s so many different ways to do it. So the first question I always ask myself is which one feels like it could be fun for me? And, you know, I have played with multiple social media platforms. I’ve done blogging. I obviously wrote a book, I’ve done podcasting. So I’ve tried a bunch of different things. And I’ve learned for me that I struggle to have joy on social media. I used to work at Facebook. That’s part of my that’s part of my love hate relationship with social media. But for me, it’s just it’s hard for me to find joy. I am a relationship space person. I love conversations with people, and social media just feels like shouting into a void. And it’s it’s not fun. So I’ve mostly leaned on other methods and, you know, I’ve loved doing podcasts. Back in the day, I just had to pause it because I didn’t have time for it. I do like writing, so I do a weekly newsletter that feels really fun for me. And then on those times I do show up on social media because there is some benefit to people being able.

Erin Baker: [00:21:49] So if they’ve discovered me, kind of look me up and make sure I’m, you know, not a ridiculously crazy human, when I do show up on social media, I ask myself the same question, What’s my way of doing this? What’s the joyful way of doing this? I ask myself, What are the rules? I’m telling myself exist in this space and are they true? And so that’s allowed me to show up when I feel like it. I don’t necessarily have a posting schedule. It’s allowed me to not have to have the pretty Canva graphics all the time. And the more I lean into what resonates for me, the more people come my way. So it’s really going back to that question. It’s marketing doesn’t have to feel painful because there are so many different options. Find the most you one, whatever. It’s everything you love to write, you love to speak, you love to be on video, you love to write, copy, whatever it is. And then once you’ve decided on that, continually ask myself, What are the rules I’m asking or I’m telling myself, exist here? And are they true? Is there a way I can do it my way?

Stone Payton: [00:22:56] I am so glad that I asked. All right. So even as good as I suspect you are at this whole business of joy, surely you know you’ve got to run out of gas now and again. Batteries need recharging. Is there a is there a joy well, or an inspiration source that you go to or do you break away and do like 180 degrees and go do something? Totally. Where do you go? How do you recharge?

Erin Baker: [00:23:26] Yeah. So the first thing is, I just love that you ask this question because one of my things I harp on most with my clients is that we can’t have joy without rest. And rest is really hard for a lot of us because we’re so programed into being productive all the time and grinning through. And when we rest, we start feeling the aches and pains that we’ve been muscling through and we start feeling the feelings that we haven’t, you know, felt in a long time. And so it’s really, really uncomfortable for people to rest. But it is absolutely imperative. Just like an athlete, I have a really good friend who was a professional soccer player and an Iron Man, and he taught me that rest day is a training day because your muscles can’t grow unless you rest. Yeah. And so I think the same way with joy is you’ve got to rest for the joy tank to be replenished. And oftentimes it’s more than you think you need. And you have to battle all of those demons in your mind that are telling you, you know, you’re lazy, you’re no good, get back to work. So I ask myself almost every day, does my body need rest? And that rest could be all day. It could be. I take a walk, it could be anything. And then from there, I do believe we can fill up on joy. I love this idea of a joy tank.

Erin Baker: [00:24:53] And it’s not one that we drain like a gas tank. You know, we wait till we’re on empty to fill it up. It’s more like how we hydrate ourselves, right? Where we kind of need to always have some some water in our system. If we get too dehydrated, filling up is not going to feel good. So I think of there’s these four ingredients of joy that I think are really important. So I’ll repeat them again, which is a connection, which it could be connection to self, could be connection to other people. It could be connection. To, you know, spirit, God, higher power, whatever you believe in. Then there’s curiosity. Creativity and courage. So every day I will ask myself, what’s one tiny act of connection I can do today? So that might be. I meditate, connect to myself. Could be I go on a walk, could be I send a text to a friend and just say, Hey, thinking about you. The next is what’s one tiny act of curiosity I can do today. What can I be curious about? Might be. I wonder what I want to post on social media or I wonder what would happen if I tried something new in my business. What’s one tiny creative thing I can do? And we’re creating all the time. This is not art. It doesn’t have to be, you know, painting, dancing. It could be, you know, I you can create space even you can create, you know, I can write down something that’s I can journal.

Erin Baker: [00:26:24] There’s I can create a single line that is an insight of mine. And then the last one, courage, which courage is oftentimes people look at me funny. Why is courage part of joy? And courage to me is imperative because. We are often avoiding pain in life and we want the easiest route to things. But if you look back on your entire life, the things you’ve been most satisfied by were the things where you overcame an obstacle or you leaned into fear or you took a risk. Right. So we need to step in to courage in order to feel joy. And so I, I think it’s one of the most underrated but important ingredients in this joy equation. So I ask myself every day, what’s one tiny act of courage? What’s one risk I can take? It might be, you know, applying for a podcast that I think I don’t deserve to be on. Or it could be inviting someone to a coffee date or putting out something on social media that seems a little bit risky or out of character. So one tiny act. So it’s one tiny act of connection, one tiny act of curiosity, one tiny act of creativity, and one tiny act of courage. And that’s what helps replenish the joy tank for me every day.

Stone Payton: [00:27:43] What a fabulous set of I’ll call them Pro Tips.

Erin Baker: [00:27:48] Yeah.

Stone Payton: [00:27:49] For us to wrap or that is fantastic. All right. So if our listeners would like to reach out and have a conversation with you or someone on your team, I want to make sure that they can get their hands on the on the book. And so let’s leave them with some coordinates, some points of contact. Whatever you feel like is a is appropriate, whether it’s a website or email or something like that.

Erin Baker: [00:28:10] Sure. So I will give a few things. First of all, my book is available on Amazon and it’s joyful if AF The essential business strategy we’re afraid to put first. If you’re the type that likes to do email or websites, you can find me at Erin M Baker, Tor.com and you can email me at Erin at Erin, M Baker dot com And if you like social media, I do hang out on Instagram at Dr. Erin M Baker And one of the things I love is connecting with people. So if you want to drop me a message and say, Wow, you had this insight, or Hey, I’m struggling with this particular thing in business, can you help send me a message? I really love meeting new people and connecting that way. And it’s connection. It’s part of my joy.

Stone Payton: [00:28:58] Well, Aaron, please stay on the line even as we go out. But I got to say, this has been an absolute joy. I was going to say delight, but I think I’ll say joy. Yes.

Erin Baker: [00:29:09] You are very similar.

Stone Payton: [00:29:11] No, the work you’re doing is so important and we sincerely appreciate you. Thank you so.

Erin Baker: [00:29:17] Much. Well, thanks for having me on. Stone. This was very joyful for me as well.

Stone Payton: [00:29:22] All right. Well, until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Aaron Baker and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.