What If the Problem Isn't You? w/Becky Mollenkamp

Hello, Becky. Welcome to the Powerful Women Rising Podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. Yes, I'm so excited to talk to you today.

I can't even remember how I found you to begin with, but you and I have been in each other's circles for a while. And uh you reached out about being on the podcast, and I was like, why didn't I think of this before? So so excited to have you here and to talk about your new book. That's super exciting.

Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, I'm like a month as we're recording this, a month out from the publishing date. And it's already, it's weird how it was everything for so long.

And now it's already starting to feel like almost in the rear view, rear view mirror, but it's not. Oh, yeah, I did write a book. Yeah, I know. It's a wild experience.

Yeah. Yeah, that's so awesome. Okay, so before we dive in, tell everybody a little bit about you and about what you do. Yeah, I'm a feminist business coach.

I work with founders who are growing but don't want to grow in ways that replicate the crappy corporate America experience. Many of them left, and they're trying to figure out what that looks like to run a human first business. And we work together on all the things from self-leadership to leadership of others and marketing, all the sort of pieces of how to do that in a way that really honors your human first values. That's amazing.

I love that. And how long have you been doing that kind of work? 15 years. It's been evolving over time, but I've been a coach for 15 years.

That's amazing. That's awesome. I love that. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about your book because I think it's so interesting when I was preparing for this episode and reading your book and thinking about, you know, I always try on my podcast episodes to make sure that we're providing like actionable strategies and like real world things and tangible, and you can apply this right now.

And I feel like your book and the topic we're going to talk about today is applicable in a lot of different ways, but it's also a lot more just like I hate to say mindset related because you know how I feel about that word, but it really is like the way that we're thinking about our business, right? And the way that our business fits in the world itself and the way that we fit in the world and how all of that works together. So your book is called Liberate Your Business. I want to talk first about like what is a liberated business and how is that different than a traditional business?

I think to me, it's sort of flipping things on its head where a traditional business is how does your life fit into your business? And a liberated business is one where it's how does this business fit into my life? It's putting the human first and the business second, the human first and the money second. That is not to say that we don't make money and that our business isn't important.

I think people can sometimes, in a, you know, with all of our capitalist conditioning, as soon as you start to say people first and profit second, people start to go, ooh, I don't know about that. That sounds scary. I'm not in any way encouraging people to not make money. We all have to pay the bills.

But it really is about saying, with every part of our business, what does it mean for me to think about this in a way that honors me as a human first, my team, my communities, my clients? Like, how do I honor the humans in this business first and then think about the ways that the business can support those things? And that is that is very different than I think the model most of us are taught, which is how do we think about profits first? And then where do we fit the people in to make that happen?

And kind of the the people become nothing more than a tool in the business. Yeah. So how does that one of the things that I was noticing when I, or one of the things that I circled and underlined when I was reading your book is uh you have a line in there that said, What if the problem isn't the bird? What if the problem is the cage?

Tell us what that means and how that applies to having a liberated business. Yeah, it's a little riff on Maya Angelou's I know why the cage bird sings, which is something that has a lot of meaning for me. And it is that feeling of I think most of us are made to believe that we are the problem. The bird is the problem, right?

And that's why we're singing, crying, whatever it is, that we have to just work on ourselves and then we can fit into this world around us. And I really think we need to start questioning why we are in the cage to begin with? Does this cage have a door? Yes, and can we open it?

Yes. What if it's already open? And we just need to learn how to let ourselves out of it. And what that means to me in the business world is, and why the subtitle of my book is for A Radical Guide for Entrepreneurs Building Inside a Broken System.

It is about the system in which we operate, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, those systems I say are broken. The truth is they're doing, they're operating exactly as they're meant to, but they are harmful toxic systems. And we are trying to contort ourselves to work inside of those systems. And the contorting isn't the problem.

It's the system that forces us to contort that is the problem. And so, what if we start to give ourselves permission to say, I don't have to be fixed here? It is how do I allow myself to operate in a way that honors myself? Even if I can't fully leave this cage yet, I can't leave the system.

How do I maybe make the changes where I can with the system? But then also say, I don't have to blame myself anymore. I can say I'm allowed to run my business the way that feels right for me. And for anyone who's a woman, anyone who's non-white, who's, you know, a BIPOC, anyone who is disabled, any of the things that sort of fit outside of the, you know, white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal system, that is really important because these systems are not made for us.

And we think that we have to make ourselves operate as if we were a white hetero, you know, cis het white man, um, able-bodied, all of that. And we try really hard. And because we can't, you can't when that's not who you are, you feel broken. And so I'm challenging you to say, like, what if we say no?

No, I'm not going to contort myself anymore. I'm gonna allow myself to show up in my fullness as a human and let my business operate in the way that works for me. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's part of why, you know, I said earlier, I have issues with the word mindset. And I really don't. I have issues with what have been what has been done with the word mindset. Me too.

Absolutely crucial, right? It's, I mean, it is amazing how much you can change your feelings, change your experience, change your day, change your life by changing your thoughts a hundred percent. And there are so many coaches, life coaches, business coaches, coaches of all kinds who say all of your problems can be solved by changing your thoughts, right? And if you're not getting the results that you want, it's because of your thoughts.

And if everyone else in this program is getting the results, but you're not getting the results, it's because something is wrong with you and the way that you are thinking, right? It has nothing to do with the fact that you are the only non-white person in this group. It has nothing to do with the fact that everyone in this group has a background in marketing, but you don't. It has nothing to do with the fact that everyone in this group has thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to invest in their business and you don't, right?

And so that's, I think, my my beef with mindset is like, yes, it's important, and that's a lot of what you're talking about too. It's like not just trying to fit yourself into that box of how everyone says, like, this is the solution to the problem, because the solution to the problem for me, being a white woman born into a middle class family in Colorado, is not going to be the same situation for a non-white woman born in Chicago to a family of people who have never graduated from college and are making minimum wage, right?

We're never, it's not going to be the same solution. And so that I think is a lot of my struggle with the coaching world, specifically the business coaching world, is this one size fits all solution that doesn't take into account all of these systems that you're talking about. We are on the same page, 100%. Yes, and that's my problem too.

And sometimes it's almost like, oh, I don't like calling myself a coach because of that. Um, but coaching is in a in and of itself, it is a skill set, right? Coaching is a set of skills that you can use. And that's great.

Coaching as an industry is deeply flawed. And it is, but then again, so are so many industries. Consulting, all sorts of things. It just shows up a little more acutely often in coaching uh because of the way that we operate and the kinds of work we're doing.

But the truth is it's everywhere. Because, like you said, with marketing, these same things show up in the idea that if you just use this one marketing solution, it's gonna work again without any understanding of how the differences in who you are as a business owner or who your clients are, like what that changes the relationship with that solution. The first chapter of my book is called Is It Really Mindset? And that is because of exactly what you're talking about.

I think, and that's why we start there, because I think so much of what has been done to us is to make all of the systemic issues personal. It's all about how we fix ourselves. And so many of us have gotten so fixated on that that we aren't looking around and seeing the bigger problems, or we're seeing them when we feel like we can't do anything about them and that we just need to focus on ourselves. That is done by design.

That is so that we aren't actually looking beyond ourselves and saying, hey, I'm mad as hell and I'm gonna change this system. We're too busy worrying about why we're what's wrong with us, why we're so bad, why we can't figure it out. And so I start there because that is what the systems have done. They force us all to be thinking and only really thinking about that.

And I want people to interrogate that and challenge that and say, is it really my mindset? Because sometimes you're right. Mindset is important. How we think about things does matter.

The problem is too much of what's out there is making it only about that. And they do that without putting that in some context, without acknowledging the systems that are at play, right? And so, and that can that is not only unhelpful, it's actually really harmful. And that's the part that I think we really have to talk about is that it's harmful to do that.

So if you are a coach, and I used to be this person, I talk about it very openly in the book. Before I did a lot of my own work, I know that I replicated harm, that I caused harm to people by using some of this mindset stuff that so many of us as coaches learn. But we are often white people learning it from white people, you know, uh people of a certain class learning it from people of a certain class. We aren't understanding how to change that work to be relevant and helpful to different identities because the identities you hold absolutely affect the world around you and how the world around you treats you and how you move about the world.

And if our work doesn't honor that, then we're harming people by telling them, no, just go think different. When in fact, you can't think your way out of racism, you can't think your or feel your way out of sexism. And I think most of us have some marginalized identity where we, when we can think of it through that lens, we say, like, oh, that's right. That's right.

No amount of my, although to be clear, like when I talk about imposter syndrome in here as well, the system still makes us believe that we can. Like, oh no, women, it's just because you have imposter syndrome. That's why you're not advancing in your career or making as much as men or whatever the other things are. When the truth is, no, there's actual real systemic barriers that are keeping you from those things, and they're trying to make you think it's your fault.

When in fact it's the systems that are the problem, not you, right? That women aren't making on average like 75 cents to the dollar for decades now to men because we haven't learned how to get over our imposter syndrome. That's just not true. Right.

Right. So we have to, yeah, I'm I'm just all I can say is I'm 100% with you. Like we've got to stop it with the mindset stuff. We have to put everything we do needs to be contextualized inside of the systems we live because none of us exist in a vacuum.

We all live inside these systems. Yeah. So when we look at this practically, like I'm on board with everything we're talking about. I love what you say about, you know, looking at your own internalized beliefs about yourself, about building your business based off of your values and your boundaries and your community and your goals and you know, all of that.

I love it on a higher level. Yeah. On a like, this is our perfect world, and everything is wonderful. And also, like you said at the beginning, we got mortgage to pay, right?

Like we got bills to pay, we need to make money. And I understand how it can seem so scary to say, forget these systems, I'm going my way, I'm doing it my way. When on the inside, we're like, and also please like give me money for it. So I'm not even sure what my question is there, but like, how do we create the courage to do it that way?

Or like, how do those things work together when we want to challenge these traditional business ideas and we still also want to grow a profitable profitable business? Well, I think first and foremost, we have to free ourselves from the binary and from the idea of perfectionism. Those are definitely systemic tools that keep us locked into certain behaviors. And what I mean by that is there's not a, you're either doing it right or you're doing it wrong, or there's no perfect inside of an imperfect system, right?

So you're never gonna be able to do things fully aligned with your values if you have truly human, human first values and still pay the mortgage, probably, right? Or at least not pay the mortgage and pay for health care because we live in an imperfect system where we have to pay for our own healthcare. Like things that systemically, if we would address systemically, we could solve for. But since we haven't, we have to function inside those systems.

And so, yeah, you won't be able to do all the things. This book is full of all kinds of things that you can do, but there is nothing about it that I say you have to do all of them or you're doing it wrong. It's figuring out what are the things you can do. Maybe you can't yet say, I never work on a weekend.

But maybe you start to say, I am gonna take off every Sunday, like I am just gonna make Sunday sacred or Saturday sacred. Or maybe you say, like, I can't yet, I don't yet have the confidence to charge more for this thing. But maybe you could just bump it up by 5%. Or, you know, maybe you can't yet say, I want to give all my employees health care because it's just astronomically expensive.

But maybe you look into some other option that allows them to have some other thing. I don't know what that might be access to a gym or other things that might help lower their own healthcare costs in ways that you can't. Like it's thinking about what are the things that I can do and what are the things I'd like to do, right? And how do I find the balance in those?

It's just starting to examine where am I ready and able to start to make changes that say I'm putting the human first in this part, this experience, and where are the places I can't yet? But I really think that the most important piece is the awareness, which I think so often we sort of bypass and say, like, yeah, yeah. But the truth is most of us are not really doing that examination inside of our businesses yet. We aren't truly looking at how much of this is because I want it, because it honors me as a human who runs the business, because it honors my clients and their needs versus the things that I think will just get the manipulate them to get them what I to do, what I want them to do.

How much of this honors my employees versus what I just was told is how you have to have your employees? How much of this honors what I really want for my community versus what I think I'm allowed to do or have the agency to do? That examination rarely gets done in the context of what are my values? What do I want this to look like?

What would in an ideal world would I want it to be? Right. Most of us are just operating on what we the script we've always learned inside of corporate America, capitalism's playbook, the things that we've all been given. And so I just I can't say enough how important the awareness piece is.

Asking those questions of yourself and also examining what's enough. And I know that can sometimes sound simple for people or it can sound really scary because it sounds like limiting. Enough should never be limiting. Enough means truly enough.

Right. That should be like in a world where we don't learn to be satiated, right? Where we learn over consumption in all the places in our lives, the idea of enough is really challenging for many of us, which is why we have people like Jeff Bezos who are hoarding so much wealth because they have never learned what enough is. And I really think that's the other big piece is challenging ourselves to really get in touch with what's enough.

Because that starts to make all of the other decisions become more clear. And I'm not just talking about money, although that's really important, but also what's enough rest? What's enough relationship? What's enough care?

What's enough community? What's enough fun? What's enough pleasure? We need to examine all of that because those are the areas we usually don't give ourselves enough.

Well, money we think we can never have enough, right? So I think examining all of that, along with the awareness of like, what do I really want here? Then we can begin to start saying, okay, now what are the things I actually have agency to do right now? Yeah.

You won't be able to do them all. Permission granted to not do them all. Permission granted to not feel like a failure by not doing them all. No one can.

Not inside a broken system. But what you can do is begin to make small changes because you're aware, because you know what you actually need to have enough, you can start to actually make little changes here and there in the way you operate that begin to create just ever so slightly and ever so slowly an increasing sense of my I come first before my business, that I matter, that I have more freedom, I have agency. Those things begin to change. I know people love one, two, three.

Here's the five steps, here's the easy solutions. But that's also part of what's gotten us here. Right. Because there is no, again, one one size fits all three-step solution for anything, including liberating your business.

But I would say it starts with awareness and understanding enough, and then beginning to do the examination of what are the things I can potentially change here and giving yourself that permission to go slow and steady. Yeah, I love that so much because we really are a society that if we can't do it perfectly, we don't want to do it. If we can't do it all, then why even bother? Right.

And I love what you're saying about like pick something that you can do. And maybe you can't do it 100%, maybe you can do it 50%. But if it's 50% more than what you did yesterday, that's amazing, right? But in our minds, we it's so easy for us to think like it might as well be zero.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's it's how we're conditioned. So that's totally normal, right? So giving you also all the grace, everyone all the grace to say, of course we feel this way.

It's what we're conditioned into because again, that is such a great tool of the oppressor. If you feel like you can only do it perfectly, guess what happens? You never take action because imperfect action feels so bad that you won't do anything. And they're counting on that, right?

That they what they don't want to see is that you're actually making a conscious decision today to say, do I want to buy this from Amazon? Or is actually, could I get in my car and just head to a local retailer and support a small business? Like some days you're gonna order it from Amazon and that's okay, right? There's no guilt in that.

I sell my book on Amazon, Amazon. It's also on my website because I know some people, disabilities and other reasons means they need they need to get through Amazon, and that's okay. I also have other options, right? That's part of what I do.

Like I'm not doing it perfectly. In a perfect, if I were to say I'm showing up 100% values aligned, I would not even allow anyone to buy it on Amazon. Yeah. That actually is not really true because there are people for whom Amazon is the only way, that's their lifeline to being able to actually purchase anything in this imperfect system.

And so, okay, then I'm gonna make myself available on Amazon for those folks. And that doesn't mean I'm failing or I'm not doing it right. It means that I made a conscious decision about what I wanted to do with my book, where I wanted to make it available, where I typically promote is my website because that to me feels like the better option. I take care of mailing manually mailing things or handing things out.

I get to keep more of the profits, which I think versus Jeff Bezos, that's great. You know, I'm not employing people at some living wages, all of that. And I also decided to make it available on Amazon for all the reasons I've said. So, like that's what it looks like in the smallest ways, again, to examine every decision and ask ourselves what are the choices I can make here?

And am I making them with awareness about the reasons for those decisions? And can I really justify my decisions? Yeah. Yeah.

That I think is the key piece is that you're making those decisions consciously rather than just following what the world says we're supposed to do or what we assume we're supposed to do because it's what everybody else is doing. Yeah. Um, you have a chapter in your book that of course I love, given what I do, um, called Network versus Networth. And I want to talk about that a little bit just because relationships are such a huge part of what I teach.

And I want to hear from you in your mind what is the difference between relationship building that is rooted in genuine connection versus relationship building that is actually just another form of extraction? Yeah. I mean, to me, it's relational versus transactional, right? Am I going into this experience because I want to get something from someone?

And that is the only reason. That's deeply transactional and also something almost every one of us has experienced if you've done much networking. You go to the thing, and it's just about how many business cards can I get so that I can follow up and ask you to buy something from me, or even worse, ask you to buy from me right now. Don't know you.

Don't care about you. Just buy my thing. That doesn't feel good and it doesn't really work that well. You have to do, like, I mean, anybody who's done much in the way of sales, and I used to do sales for a while, if you do cold outreach, your turn, your conversion rate is exceptionally low.

Because we don't like to buy from people we don't know. We humans just by nature are relationship people. We are relational. And so to me, what it looks like is saying, going into every experience, saying, How can I help this person?

How can I build a true relationship with this person? What does it look like for me to think about this as a human with whom I will have a relationship over time? Right? That changes the way I'm going to show up.

Because if I'm going into it saying, I want to build a relationship over time with this person, I can't make my first interaction be, hi, I'm Becky, buy my thing. Do you need this thing? Buy it. Because that's the quickest way to turn somebody off.

I mean, it's so simple. And yet we all the time we are taught these really gross techniques because you see people showing up on Instagram, you've never heard from them. The first thing is a really personal voice message that you know it's just them trying to get you by something. I get them on LinkedIn all the time.

It's the quickest way for me to delete. But if you show up in my LinkedIn inbox and say, I really love that interview you did on Melissa's show, it was really great. And I would love to just get to know you better. Could we hop on a coffee chat?

I'm gonna say yes. Now, if I showed up to that coffee chat and then you asked me questions about me and you say, When can we talk again? Or even better, I know this other person who's doing similar work who I just know you guys would probably vibe. Could I introduce you?

Still haven't asked me about anything. I'm gonna keep getting to know you. And then eventually I'm gonna say, Oh my gosh, I met this person who does exactly that thing you need. Let me introduce you to because you need that thing right now.

And I just met this person who I know is a really good human, and you're gonna like them, and I'm gonna introduce you, and then that cut turns into a sale. You can that is a long game, right? And so people think, oh, that takes too long. I can't wait that long.

It's a way better conversion, right? I buy from people I know, like, and trust. That I mean it's an old marketing habit, and it's true for a reason. And so to me, it's like, are you going into this experience trying to simply get a transaction done that's extractive, or am I looking at it as I want to build a relationship with somebody that maybe hopefully eventually serves us both?

Yeah, and that's really important. It should be the reciprocity has to be there. That's what makes something relational. If it's not reciprocal, meaning you're both getting something from the relationship, and sometimes one's getting more, sometimes someone else is getting more, but there is on the overall lifespan of this relationship a reciprocal feeling that both people feel like, yeah, knowing them, having them in my life has helped me.

And they would say the same. That's what I that is like relationship marketing, relationship networking. That is the stuff that is not gross, it's not capitalist. Yes, I could not have said that better myself.

I love that. Okay, so if people want to read your book, obviously they can get it from your website or Amazon or Amazon, if that's your thing. Uh, where else can people connect with you, learn more about you, all the things? Well, there's two places.

You go to Becky Mollenkamp.com, and the book is right there, and you can learn more about the book, get the book, learn more about my coaching. But I also have smashingpatriarchy.com, which I owned for a long time and did nothing with.

I just redirected it to my website, but I have finally done something with it and it's really fun. So I always encourage people to go. It's a very interactive website and two completely different experiences if you're on mobile or on desktop. But go in there and click around and have some fun because it's layers deep of just really fun things that take you to all sorts of different things in my ecosystem.

I love that. That's awesome. Okay, I will put the links for all of that in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming and being a guest.

I think I am excited to listen to this episode. I listen to my episodes. I don't know if that's weird. I think it's weird.

But right? If you don't want to listen to it, why would anyone else? I think that's fantastic. Yeah.

And I feel like this is one of the ones that like we all need to listen to like three or four times because we're gonna get something different every time. And there's so many, just like, I mean, sometimes they're questions without answers, but or I should say questions without right answers, but questions worth thinking about and exploring for our own businesses. And I think that's really, really helpful. So thank you.

Also, probably because I talk too fast, so you'll have to listen to it again just because I spoke so fast. So, but also if you want to learn from me, that do it on time and a half or gonna have to slow it down. That's how I that's how I listen to podcasts until it's my voice, and I'm like, whoa, Becky, when I do that, I sound like it's like a mouse. Um, but yeah, if you're interested in these sorts of things, the book goes into all of it in much more detail.

So, but thank you so much for having me, Melissa. This was fun. Absolutely.