Overcoming The Achievement Addiction With Shauna VanBogart

In today's blog post, I sat down and interviewed returning guest, Shauna VanBogart! She has also spoken at some of the She Did It Her Way Summits and it's an honor to have her back.

Shauna helps small business owners build, run, and scale sustainable service-based businesses that feel as good as they look. After completing a graduate degree in Communications and Leadership Studies, building four businesses from 0 to over six and multiple six-figures in annual revenue, and 10+ years mentoring business owners running everything from start-ups to multi-million dollar brands, Shauna knows precisely what it takes to evolve a business and elevate its income.

So a little background on how Shauna and I met… We were both in the entrepreneurial program at the University of Iowa and we got connected via alumni when I was in Columbia, South Carolina, which is an hour and a half away from Charleston, in Shauna's state. We had only talked on the phone and never really met in person so we decided to finally meet and it's been such a beautiful and blessing relationship ever since then.

In the years that we've known each other (which has been probably five-plus years at this point), it's been amazing and a beautiful thing to see her business evolve and adapt but also see her evolve personally. She has come through this rebirth, and how she's helping small business owners. Right now she works exclusively with business owners to, in its most general sense, help them get what they want. And that's the business she's been in for over a decade... helping people get the things they want. Business owners are usually looking for more money, more time or more energy. She has a really beautiful hybrid approach of mindset and performance coaching and strategy being a small business owner for going on 13 years now. So when clients come to her, she first and foremost, does a lot of transformation work.

She created her online academy and was able to meet her biggest competitor in New York, giving them a chance to be paired together versus competing. They expanded the online Academy in a very big way and went international with it, which was great. So for her, it seemed like the next obvious, realistic practical next step was to expand digital offerings in some capacity. She had a lot of success with that. And she just felt like, “Okay, we go bigger with that,” looking at it very linear. So, she started to have the thought of "Okay, it is great to have that Academy, but I'm feeling like I'm missing something that's mine, exclusively mine, and what feels, you know, so good to me."

So, she went back to self-development. She's been in self-development since she was eight years old. She had an image in her mind of an eight-week online evergreen program. That is where she started building it all. She hired coaches and it was a big production and she felt like it sucked the life out of her. It was around the time that "Best Kept Self" came on board. She had this image consultant, that over the years, she had essentially contracted out the client work because she thought that's what she wanted to do. She had these contractors specializing in various fields of all the image consulting specialties and it got further away from image consulting and became more of this one-stop-shop for transformation. So, if you needed a makeup artist, they had it; if you needed a fitness person, they had it, a health coach, they had a stylist, etc.

This was the time she did pivot to rebrand the very original company that she had into her "Best Kept Self" and so that came as a result of having all these people with all of this expertise. They're all in self-care. So what do we want this to be? So the Best Kept Self was born. It was a one-stop-shop for self-care and self-transformation that turned very quickly to an online magazine. Because they were publishing so much content, they had contributors all over the world. That again turned into this big digital offering versus the connection. She set-up with these companies and all of it behind the screen, and she's running companies, but she was completely missing from the picture. She was not connecting with any clients. She was just running businesses. It was great but not her zone of genius. After all the thoughts and realization she said to herself "I'm done. I'm letting it ride the sunset straw that broke the camel's back" as they got a partnership with a major publication, a major national magazine, and the partnership agreement was that they would have to publish some of their content and vice versa and exposure. They asked her company to promote a product that does not align with their brand. This made her realize that she needed to step back and focus on what she really wanted to do!

She created an online Academy, now this growing business Best Kept Self, but as she kept achieving bigger achievements, kept hitting these bigger milestones, she felt less and less fulfilled. It was like the law of diminishing returns. Where’s the connection? She kept asking herself, “what’s the point of achieving all this if I if I'm not looking forward to waking up in the morning when I run my own businesses.” This brought her back to one on one coaching. After years of being successful in running her businesses, she realized that she’s meant to go deeper with people. She has a whole other side of herself, which most of her close friends know about, that is closeted-intuitive. She was always kind of the go-to person for any form of advice. She has this kind of various skill set of different gifts, symbolic and very prophetic dreams and just the ability to see things. Some of you may resonate with that, that you may have these gifts but maybe not realizing that there's a place for that in business. And so there was a whole other side to her that she stuffed in the backseat, or, in the closet, and she wouldn't even let that come into her business. Part of me taking a step back to reflect, she has launched a podcast called “Just Being” to talk about all these and connect with the people that resonate with this.

“So the journey actually was me rediscovering who I really am and owning that and saying to myself, these things deserve to have a seat at the business table. What's ironic about all of this is that the more me I became, the more satisfied I was way more money was made and I have so much Like, just general fulfillment and energy. Yeah, I had to really embrace this other, excuse me, like, I really had to embrace these other components to myself.” Shauna felt that being herself and rediscovering what she really wants to do and brace the other side of herself makes her feel more fulfilled and satisfied. With her embracing these new components, she launched her podcast called “Just Being Podcast”.

We sabotage when things are easy. The question that you need to ask around the ease and the hard thing paradigm is, what are you trying to prove? Why do you keep upping the ante with all this achievement? What are you trying to prove? And to whom are you trying to prove it? These questions knock Shauna and realizing that all of it was proving energy, all of it.

The framework of dismantling and becoming aware of the achievement addiction to get them into a place to start to unwind that. Shauna shared these steps. The first thing is to ask yourself, How are you feeling when you achieve. How are you feeling not what you're doing, not what results are happening but how does it make you feel when you achieve? That's your measuring stick right there. So if you're feeling kind of deflated or nothing really happened, then essentially, you can see, okay, you're putting in all this effort, and it's equaling what pay off? Not tangibly, I'm saying pay off for you internally. Because when we feel good, we have energy. And the more we feel good, we have an energy reserve. And when we have energy reserve, the more we have to inspire those creative ideas within us. So the first question is, how do I feel? What do I love to do? And Get into the nitty-gritty. So like every aspect of your business and your life, what are the things that you just could spend all day on, and it feels like you've had a cup of coffee afterward? What are the things that energize you? The second question then is, what are the things that I excel at? Some of them might be the same as the first but some of them aren’t. The third question I would go into is, who do I love to work with? And who do I love to be around? What are the types of people? What are their personalities, again, in business and outside of your business? And then the fourth question is, what does this all mean? So essentially, what you've crafted there is you shown what do you been reflective about coming back. What lights me up? What is my skill set in my zone of genius that I love to work with? And then contrast that the next step would be to contrast that with what your business looks like right now. Chances are there's a big gap there. What's missing? What do you need to bring more into your business and what do you need to step away from?

See you again next week my dear friends!