250. Lessons From 13 Years in Business

So who are you without your business card? Who are you without your business credentials? And who are you when there's no team, no structure, no title, no calendar that's already pre booked for you, no HR department, no sales team. This moment, right here is not just a pivot, it's a beginning of your soul's initiation.

Welcome to life after Corporate, your ultimate guide for making the leap from corporate leader to entrepreneur. I'm Deb Boulanger, entrepreneur, executive leader and founder of the Launch Lab for Women Entrepreneurs. This is your time to break through the glass ceiling once and for all and get your ticket to the C suite. Come back each week to get the leading strategies, advice and tools that will give you the skills and confidence you need to replace your corporate paycheck.

Are you ready? Let's go. So let's talk about the three visibility myths that keep you stuck, and let's bust through them. There are some of the things that I see over and over again that really keep brilliant women just like you spinning their wheels in the content trap.

And myth number one is that posting more equals more clients. The truth is, posting doesn't drive sales, positioning does. If your audience can't clearly understand what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters to them, they will just scroll right by you. Myth number two is I need to be everywhere in order to be successful.

Nope, you don't need to be omnipresent. You need to be resonant. The right message shared with the right intention, in the right places, with the right consistency will outperform any spray and pray strategy you may have learned from an online course. And myth number three is I need a better funnel or ad strategy.

And I hate it when women come to me and they're over educated on digital marketing because you've tried to do so much and none of it effectively and half of it you don't even need. So you don't need a better funnel or an ad strategy. Funnels simply amplify what's not working in your business. So if your message is confusing, all you're doing is scaling the confusion.

And no technology can save a misaligned brand. So let's talk about what attention alchemy is and how you can put it to work in your business. So if more content and more platforms and more funnels aren't the answer, then what is? What is that secret formula that's going to give you visibility, amplify your thought leadership, and actually get you clients?

So here's the framework that I've Built over years of coaching women out of corporate and into thriving coaching and consulting businesses. And it has four pillars. Pillar number one is magnetism. Magnetism is about being seen without performing.

Magnetism isn't about having perfect branding. It's about presence. It's the energy that people feel before they even read a word that you've written. When you own your voice, your story, your perspective, you become magnetic.

You don't have to chase, you don't have to chase prospects, you don't have to chase your next sale. You attract the right people into your ecosystem. Step 2 in attention Alchemy is message clarity. You want to be heard precisely or be heard with precision.

People don't buy transformation. I can't tell you how many times I've had a life coach tell me I help people transform from the inside out. And I always reply that no one wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and smacks themselves on the head and says, oh my God, I need to transform from the inside out. So they don't buy transformation.

They buy relief from pain. They buy the solution to the problem that keeps them up at night. Your clear messaging speaks both to their ache and their aspiration. It's not clever copy, which is why sometimes using these AI copywriters can actually hurt your message clarity more than help it.

Because what makes you magnetic and what makes you heard with precision and attracts your ideal clients to you is your emotional truth. And that's what we try to put through in every single message that we put out to the marketplace. Step three is strategic consistency. Right?

Be consistent, be trusted, but don't burn out trying to do it. So strategic consistency doesn't mean you're posting multiple times a day on multiple platforms. It means that you're showing up with a rhythm and a relevance that your ideal clients can really groove to. Right?

So for me, that's theme based content weeks. So think about it. Mindset traps, client wins. Lessons from the entrepreneurial edge.

Things that resonate that are are full of rich stories that resonate deeply with your ideal client. So it's less volume but more meaning. And step four is conversion confidence. And this is how you get hired with ease.

This is where most new entrepreneurs hesitate. So if you're not making offers with clarity and you're not feeling confident, you're not embodying your value, you're not activating the attention that you've earned. And when you know your return on advantage and the value that you absolutely, undeniably bring to the table, that specific tangible outcome that Only you can create. Sales don't feel like selling, it feels like being of service.

As women leaders, we learn to color inside the lines, not to rock the boat, not to be too, too, too soft, too hard, too much, not enough. But when we step out, that mold breaks completely and it can feel totally unfamiliar. So whether you left your corporate role of your own choosing, or that choice was made for you, whether you left because of burnout, or you left because of a strong desire to be of service to the world, to fulfill your mission here on this planet, or whatever reason you left, there was a wrong you want to right, or there's a mission that you feel called to fulfill.

But when we make that leap, we underestimate the transition from the identity of being a corporate leader to the identity of being a business owner. So who are you without your business card? Who are you without your business credentials? And who are you when there's no team, no structure, no title, no calendar that's already pre booked for you, no HR department, no sales team?

This moment right here is not just a pivot. It's a beginning of your soul's initiation. So let's walk through what this really looks like. Whether you've already dove in with both feet, or you're dipping a toe in, or you're thinking about someday, one day maybe you launch a business, let's talk about the process.

So first, there's a calling. And that calling usually starts as a whisper. Maybe it's a gut pull, a subtle discontent. We have a technical term for it in life after corporate.

We call it the niggle. And you realize that your ladder has been leaning on the wrong wall. And for me, that moment came right as I was in the middle of my divorce. Toward the end of my divorce, I was navigating menopause.

I was trying to be more present with my 12 year old son. And I had success. I had achieved more than I ever imagined I would when I first started my career. But I didn't have fulfillment.

And I couldn't find fulfillment in corporate. I couldn't find it in the company I was working for, and I couldn't find it when I interviewed around at other companies. And then there's this void, right? So after making that decision to leave my company and start a coaching practice, a practice I never intended to launch, I was newly credentialed.

And truthfully, even though I had decades of sales, marketing, product development and business leadership experience, I wasn't prepared for this road ahead. Right? So the void is the place where you're no longer who you were, but you're not yet who you're becoming. The title's gone, the structure's gone.

It feels like floating or free falling. I lived there during a ten day silent meditation retreat. And it was just me. It was just my thoughts and a mind that wouldn't stop.

And then in a very quiet 45 minute meditation session, there came the truth I couldn't unhear. And that was that I was meant to help others navigate this uncertainty, to navigate this transition of letting go of the fixed identity that was serving us in an unconscious way, but not in a way that truly served us, if you know what I mean. Right. So it fits all the things that are sometimes broken inside that we don't acknowledge.

The need for validation, the need for approval, the desire to have our self worth come from the outside, not necessarily the inside. And corporate is a perfect place for that. Right? So if you have an internal wound of not being good enough or, or needing to prove yourself and, and you are a perfectionist and all of those things that are greatly rewarded because you become an achiever.

Right? So if your top five Cliftons strengths are strategic activator, achiever, relator, and woo winning others over. Those were literally my top five. Those are my top five strengths.

Then you're perfect for the corporate world because you're going to work hard, you're going to go that extra mile because you want that approval. And so then you step into the void and you don't have that anymore. So you have to create it from the inside. And that's your rebirth.

Right? That's when clarity starts to trickle in and you begin creating not from approval, but from alignment. And there's a shadow side to this too, right? So not everything is a bed of roses.

We're not looking through our business with rose colored CEO glasses. And if we're being honest, entrepreneurship is messy. I post about this on LinkedIn all the time. It's the late nights, it's the scary months of low revenue.

It's another $5,000 course that you thought was going to fix it all. It's wondering how you can be this experienced and still have the quietest bank account in the room. You know, it's where you're sweating. You're waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering how the hell am I going to pay the mortgage as the primary wage earner in my family?

And if I fail, what will my husband think of me, what my partner think of me? What will my friends and Former colleagues and my children think of me. But here's the truth. It's not about failure.

And you won't fail. You've never failed at anything in your life before. So there's no failure here. And you're just becoming.

And it's in this uncomfortable, gooey, interstitial space where you're shedding the old skin. And that is where the sacred work is. And yes, it's gritty, it's vulnerable, it's sometimes ugly, and it's spiritual. It's really the biggest gift that you can give yourself in this lifetime on this planet is to give yourself the g of becoming.

And then there's the rewiring, the rewiring for sacred success. I love Barbara Hewson, AKA Barbara Stani. She wrote Overcoming Under Earning decades ago, but she wrote a book also called Sacred Success. I can't remember if it's under Barbara Stany or Barbara Hewson.

And in that she unpacks why we, especially as females, don't accept our own success and how we really need to rewire our brains in order to receive more. Because we've been conditioned through society to be worth less. And so we unconsciously think less of ourselves than we need to. And many of us had family conditioning that told us that or reinforced the belief that we were worthless.

So here's where entrepreneurship becomes a spiritual path because it's not about the hustle. It truly is about listening to your internal voice. And when entrepreneurship becomes a spiritual path, your offers, what you put out in the world becomes a full bodied yes, it becomes a complete mind meld of why you're here and what the problem is and who you want to work with and what that would look like and how you would price that. And it feels like soulful service, not performance.

We're not performing for the paycheck, we're not performing for the accolades. We're not performing for our clients to love us. We're actually performing because we want to be of service and we have discovered something and we can't hold it in any longer and we must share it with others and we're in it for their transformation. And that's when your, your sales feel like service, your pricing honors your energy and your impact.

So if you've come to any of our masterclasses or webinars, you know, I talk about something called roa and that's your return on advantage. Because you know no one is buying your self worth, no one is paying for an hour of your time. They're buying a Solution to an expensive problem. And your transformational journey, whether you're a consultant, a coach, an advisor, whatever service you're bringing to the world has value.

And the value to your client is the cost of inaction times the value of change, right? So the cost of inaction is the longer things go on the way they are. And this is true for you as well. The longer you let your problems fester and continue, the deeper the cost is financial, emotional.

The same is true for your clients and the value of change when they invest in you or when you invest in yourself and you do the work and you are aligned in the transformation that you were called to create in the first place, that's when change really happens. And so if you're hesitating to invest in yourself, this is not a manipulative pitch to get you to work with me. But if you're not investing in yourself, why would anyone invest in you? If you don't believe in yourself enough to invest in the evolution of your skills, to step into a bigger version of who you are, if you're not willing to invest in your own future success and bet on yourself, why would anyone else?

Why would anyone else bet on you or invest in you? So here's what we never talk about. We are all operating from an unconscious conditioning. And it's running the show behind the scenes whether you realize it or not.

So imagine three concentric circles, and in the center circle, you have your family of origin. And when you chose that family to be born into, you were born into a conditioned environment. So all the historical belief systems and patterns and values that your parents had that they got from their parents and that they got from their parents and their parents and so on and so on were passed down to you almost like a genetic code of consciousness that you were not aware of, because this was just how it is in your family.

So that's where your ideas about money and value and self worth come from, right? So when I was growing up, the thing I heard most often from my dad was, deb, don't do a half assed job, right? So he learned he was conditioned in his childhood that performance, equal praise, and the worst thing that you could possibly do would be a half assed job. And so he instilled in me that love was conditional and it was based on performance.

And maybe you can relate to that. So that's when I learned that I had to be a good girl. There was a very narrow line that I could walk. I had to outperform my expectations or at least Understand what those expectations were so I could meet them and not be met with disappointment, which to a child is actually heartbreaking.

So while it wasn't financial struggle in our family, my dad was successful. He was a cfo. But there was a lot of shame around money. And so I learned that you had to work hard for your money and that life was hard and you had to sacrifice and spending was shameful.

So whenever I spent money, my dad would shame me. So think about the messages that you received as a child in your family growing up. They may have been messages around money. It might have been messages around your self worth of your value.

Maybe love was conditional for you too. And then let's go out to the second circle. The second circle is when you went to school and you had teachers and you had other people in your life. So you had elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, and then you went to work for corporate.

And then you got different messaging. And some of this is explicit and some of it's implicit, like it's never really said out loud. But as you observe how the system works inside the organization you're in, you learn how to comply or how to not get into trouble. And for women leaders in corporate, this is a very narrow path that we walk.

We are not paid as much, the opportunities aren't as plentiful. We have to sometimes compete for them. And if you've ever met a woman in your corporate career who was the opposite of a mentor and a support for your journey, then you know exactly what I mean. And then we have society in general and culture.

So if your family was not from the United States, then you also have a cultural conditioning that's been handed down to you, that has values and systems of, of worth and what the unwritten rules are of behavior in that environment. And we have culture in general, right? In the United States, only a few decades ago, women couldn't take out a credit card, we couldn't apply for a mortgage, we had no financial rights. We didn't even have the frigging right to vote.

So we are conditioned unconsciously that we are less than that. We are second class citizens. And if you layer into that a person of color, then you have even more conditioning layered on top of that. So those are the concentric circles of conditioning.

And that's what's running your operating system today, unless you become aware of it and you've made a conscious effort to deprogram yourself or create a new operating system. So for women especially, this conditioning runs deep. And for all of this and all of us, whether we're conscious of it or not. This creates the unconscious script that's running your day to day decisions.

So how does this show up in your business? It shows up as undercharging over delivering inadequate follow up. Because someone doesn't reply to you, you make it mean something that they're not interested. Or you just let might mean that you're procrastinating on doing the very thing that you know will move the needle of success in your business.

Or it could be perfectionism that keeps you from launching anything. So the number one mistake I see women make when it comes to inadequate sales is inadequate follow up. And that is rooted in self worth. So self worth is equal to self wealth.

So without an Instagram filter, here are my top lessons from the last 13 years. Number one your self worth is not defined by your bank account. You can experience six figure months and weeks without a single sale. It never means anything about you or your value.

Money is always a mirror and it's here to tell you what's working and what's not. But your bank account doesn't judge. It's only a barometer of how solidly you are executing on your strategy and your positioning. Lesson 2 Poor revenue months don't have to result in reduced prices not every pause deserves a flash sale.

One bad month doesn't mean your prices are too high. There is zero correlation here. But it might mean you need to get better at sales calls or hire out for some support. Whether that's someone who keeps your calendar booked and busy or someone who is more conf a more confident closer.

Lesson 3 Every conversation is a sales conversation. When you are aligned to your mission and vision, you help but notice the opportunity in every person that you meet. Being open to partnerships, referrals, and reciprocal exchanges of value makes every connection full of potential. Lesson 4 At the same time, you need great boundaries.

Guard your time and focus as your most precious assets because they are While every conversation is a sales conversation, not every person, event or request is worth your time. It's tempting to say yes whenever you're asked to speak or be a guest on a podcast, but ask first. Is this my audience? Does this host have a solid reputation and following in my industry?

And what is the potential ROI of this effort? Because the more you grow, the more precious your time becomes and your capacity is more important than a vanity metric. Which leads me to my next point. Lesson 5 People pleasing is a habit you must drop.

Saying yes when at the end of the day it's a wasted use of your time and talent. Any interesting person I would meet I would invite onto my podcast. I get so excited. It's like, oh my God, you're so interesting.

You should be on my show. But oftentimes I was disappointed by their level of insight and the true value they brought to my audience. Quality and consistency matter, so protect your brand by never diluting your message or value. Aligning with the wrong partners can actually tarnish your brand rather than enhance it.

Number six, your social media presence needs to align with your values. Just because your competitor drops a TikTok reel or Instagram story every 10 minutes doesn't mean you need to. It's tempting to judge yourself based on how well your internal worth o meter stacks up to the performance of your competitors, but don't you will connect more deeply to your audience if you are being true to you. That said, visibility is currency and while you can show up and connect in your way, you must show up and I happen to love in real life workshops and events, and I'm equally jazzed by webinars, masterclasses and workshops.

Content is the most overwhelming responsibility for an entrepreneur. I have hired no fewer than five or six social media producers or agencies and there is no silver bullet. And mark my words, ChatGPT is not a magic pill. Anytime you outsource your message, you dilute your perspective.

The best strategy I've seen is to dictate your ideas, to chat, and have it organize your thoughts into a cohesive script or piece of content. And if you know me, I am the queen of the paradigm shift in thinking. I love a good reframe, and the most creative reframes come from my own imagination and from my own lived experience. And 2026 will bifurcate authority and thought leadership between the ones who are worth following and the ones who get you to think differently and the ones who are just rehashing someone else's thinking.

Be curious. Always learn new things, Read a lot, Hang out with interesting people who expand your ideas. There's a lot to absorb in 2026 with AI, constant change and what feels like the ground beneath us constantly shifting. But if you are too rigid with your thinking, you'll fall through the cracks, too quick to react and pivot at every sign of friction.

You will not move anywhere and will burn out from moving too fast without a clear direction. If you feel like you're in the eye of the storm, you're probably right. We are in a trust recession. And here's the thing, your self trust precedes anyone trusting you, Right?

So if you don't believe in yourself, if you don't trust the words you're saying, that energy enters the room before you do. And everyone who is in that room will pick up on that vibration. So when someone says, I need to think about it, here's what you say that makes total sense. I like to think about important decisions too.

Are you open to me asking you a few questions about your thinking? What is it specifically that you need to think about now? Most times when someone says I need to think about it, the response is, okay, I understand that. You don't even make a follow up call.

Instead that person leaves the conversation where you have lost a sale and they've lost a solution. So when people express their thinking out loud, they get to the bottom line of their fear. And when they get to the bottom line of their fear, they get clarity. And it gives you a path forward.

There's something to coach on if someone can express what they're truly afraid of. And people never argue with themselves. So the purpose of a sales call is really to give them clarity around their own thinking so that they can make the best possible decision for themselves. And most of the time you chicken out.

And when they say, I can't afford it, the flip on that script is what is a priority for your investments right now? If money wasn't a barrier, does this feel like the right solution for you? Because if they say yes, then you have a path forward to working out, well, what pieces of this could we tackle right now? Or what type of a payment plan would make it easier for you?

And we're also talking about the cost of inaction and the value of change so that we're bringing ROI into the conversation. Because there's always a cost of inaction, there's always a cost of doing nothing, and there's always a value to change. So you're not pressuring them, you're just leading them into a place of possibility. And here's the structure for every converting sales conversation.

It starts with a challenge. Reaffirming their challenge, reaffirming their desired outcome. If we were having this conversation a year from now, what would you be celebrating? Mirroring it back to them?

It sounds like it's costing you confidence, it's costing you a six figure salary. And what you really want is to be celebrating crossing that milestone a year from now. Do I have that right? This is not manipulative, this is reflective, this is good conversation skills.

And then this time when Mercury is in retrograde, right now, good conversation skills are an asset. And then you ask permission to make an offer. Would you like to talk about what working together could look like? You don't pitch.

You don't slap on a sales pitch. You don't go into details about features and functions and pricing and all those details. You just ask permission. Would you like to talk about what working together could look like?

And in this conversation, you're doing about 20 to 30% of the talking. The purpose here is to clarify what your potential client's next best step is. Does that make sense? If 80% of your success as an entrepreneur is your mindset, if it's how you're showing up and what you're believing to be true, and your unconscious operating system that is truly running in the show, and it's the level of success that you're allowing yourself to receive, then what needs to shift in your business?

What needs to shift in your Life right now? 20% is skill set. And skillset is the easy part. It's easy to take a course.

It's easy to learn a new skill. It's much harder to learn how to receive and learn how to rewrite the script that you've been given and that you've been playing in your unconscious mind for decades. So this is why it's so hard to go from corporate to entrepreneurship. You're leaning so hard on your skill set, but your mindset hasn't caught up yet.

And your mind is still acting like an employee when you're an entrepreneur. So here's my invitation to you. Don't believe anything. You think your brain is naturally fear based.

95% of your full capacity lies in your unconscious mind. That's where creativity exists. That's where your brilliance lives. But your fear sits there too.

And you're relying on only 5% of your executive function and your logical brain to make your decisions. And your logical brain doesn't have the capacity to make the best decisions for you. And when you're in a place of fear, it's impossible for creativity and fear to exist in the same mind at the same time. So we need to break the pattern.

We need to observe what's happening, be compassionate, and say, isn't this interesting? I have this big desire and I'm feeling afraid right now. And then we can reframe the fear and respond differently. And it takes conscious effort and awareness and it typically takes support because to create a different result, you need to believe and behave differently.

And abundance is your birthright, not because of what you were taught or what circumstances you were born into. Abundance is your birthright. Period. It's all around you and it's yours for the asking.

So here's what I want you to walk away with today. Your self worth equals your self wealth. Your uncopyable advantage is your genetic code to client attraction and self trust precedes every single sale. You didn't lose your talent when you left corporate, you just lost your self trust for a minute.

Let's get it back. So thanks for tuning in my friend. Until next time, stay radiant, stay rooted and remember, you are already enough and the world is waiting to hear from you. The world is waiting to learn from you.

And if you're not standing up in front of the room and sharing your brilliance, then everyone is missing out. I'll see you soon. Thanks for listening my friend. If you enjoyed this show, please head over to itunes and subscribe and leave us a review.

And be sure to hop over to the Life After Corporate Facebook group and join other growing entrepreneurs to get weekly tips on how to create more money and meaning doing work you love.