How does a Broke Single Mom Do a Multi-Million Dollar Deal with Bill Gates?

She would wind up selling her business for millions to none other than Bill Gates.

And that was during a prolonged recession.

The key Biette Chalette realized the only way to go when you hit rock bottom is up.

Today's episode is here to share her story of love, of loss, of dreams, of regret, of the things that happened and the things that maybe she dreams would have happened.

It's the story of her life, the story of moving away from home, away from her home country of Germany, to the Florida Keys and eventually Los Angeles, California.

Biette Chillette is an amazing entrepreneur who has an incredible story that is sure to leave you entertained and even more so empowered to realize what is possible in your own life.

This is episode 256.

This is Grit Grace and Inspiration.

Enjoy today's episode.

I am your host, Kevin Lowe.

Twenty years ago, I awoke from a life-saving surgery only to find that I was left completely blind.

And since that day, I've learned a lot about life, a lot about living, and a lot about myself.

And here on this podcast, I want to share those insights with you.

Because, friend, if you are still searching for your purpose, still trying to understand why, or still left searching for that next right path to take, well, consider this to be your stepping stone to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

I mean, why do bad things have to happen to good people?

Why do bad things have to happen at all?

Well, I don't know, but I do know this.

The greatest breakthrough that you can have is when you can find purpose in the hardest thing you have been through.

Let me say that again.

Your greatest breakthrough will come when you can find peace and purpose in the hardest thing you have been through.

My friend, I would love to help you to discover your life's purpose, hidden inside of the challenges you have already walked through.

Text the word discover the 55444.

Again, text the word discover the 55444, and I will get you more information into how I can help you to discover your purpose.

SPEAKER_00: So I'm originally from Germany.

I was born and raised there, and I came in my early 20s to the United States.

And first I spent some time in Key West on a houseboat without water and electricity, and then I eventually landed up in Los Angeles, which I very lovingly call the city of misfits, because everybody that doesn't fit anywhere else fits in here perfectly.

SPEAKER_02: I almost would say the same about Key West, too.

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: Well, Key West, you just have to add the tie-dye shirt.

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

Absolutely.

So so me being in Central Florida, the Keys have always been a popular vacation destination for us in the summer.

And uh so that that's pretty cool.

Now, what what prompted you to move away from Germany in the first place?

SPEAKER_00: Well, there was a a number of different factors.

So, number one, I have a fairly abusive childhood story that I escaped by moving out when I was 17 and pursuing a career in the photography arts.

I always wanted to be a creative, and then I realized that I was better at the business side behind the creative side of things.

But, you know, to this day, I work with a lot of creatives and visionaries and I help them land planes.

And what I found is that in my work with, you know, first as a photographer and then as a photo editor for first of kind of like a hip magazine by the name of Wiener, which is uh United America is like, why would a magazine be called Wiener?

Um but it, you know, it's it's it's really the name of a city called Vienna, translated in German.

So it has nothing to do with an actual Wiener, but it's a Vienna, Vienna type of thing.

And then I became photo editor at L magazine in Germany.

And what happened is that my dad was a CEO of a dairy company, mid-sized dairy company, and he got fired.

He had gone to the board of directors, and he was, you know, a very competitive and a very, how would I say that, very opinionated person.

And he pushed the board.

And then the board wanted to teach him a lesson and put a vote on whether or not they still had faith in their CEO.

And then the board had a majority and he got voted out on the spot and and let go.

They didn't even have a plan on who his replacement would be, and the company got in big trouble afterward, but my dad was out.

And what I realized is that I had a lot of what my dad's attributes were in me, and I wanted to not be loved or liked or appreciated for the position that I had, but for the for me as a person.

And so a lifelong journey began.

And then I decided I was gonna go and do something I always wanted to do and never had the courage to do, which is to go abroad, to go to America for the year abroad that never ended to this day.

And you know, and off and off I went.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

So at that point in time, when you left Germany, were you single, no kids, anything like that?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was I was uh I was 23, I was single, I had no kids, and uh it was the perfect time for me to to go.

You know, I had a big relationship that fell apart at that time.

That, you know, we had really met the man of my dreams, and it was an amazing, amazing, amazing love story.

And we were together for for four years, but he now had come to a point where he had to move for a different position or a different education in a city that I just could not find myself in.

And I didn't want to be 22 and know what the rest of my life was gonna look like.

So I I screamed in horror and ran.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.

Well, good for you for choosing you.

I mean, I think that's pretty remarkable.

SPEAKER_00: You know, that's a decision Kevin, I wrestled with for for probably the following 20 years.

SPEAKER_02: But Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: You know, because what because the at the end of the day, and you know, maybe we should just spend a minute on this, at the end of the day, we all are looking for the one love that is ours to have.

And when the timing is not right, that's a really hard thing to wrestle with because you you go, well, this is this is a person that I could and would want it to be with.

You know, and we we're friends to this day.

And to this day, when I I see him and he's married, and you know, it's been married for a long time, you know, I've been in a long-term relationship, engaged to get married.

But it's not that, it's not that, you know, that desire is there, but that connection that never went away.

So when you have that and then you let that go, because for external circumstances, definitely something you wrestle with.

No question.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Now, my last little question about, you know, like you, you moving to America.

You said that you moved to the to the Florida Keys.

Why the Florida Keys?

That is the most unlikely of places that I could think of somebody moving to America to go to.

SPEAKER_00: One of my colleagues, my editor that I did a lot of the stories with, so I was the photo editor, she was an editor, uh, you know, wrote the stories.

And she had a sister who lived in Key West.

And so we had come to Key West to visit her.

And I enjoyed the weather, I enjoyed the environment, I enjoyed, I just, I just loved Key West.

I fell in love with it immediately.

And when I decided that I was going to leave the magazine and was departing from Elle, she had a friend who had a five-year-old who needed an opair.

So I ended up, after being a photo editor at Elle magazine, as an opair on a houseboat without water and electricity for about four or five months.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow, wow.

What a change in life that was.

SPEAKER_00: It's certainly not a not a thing on the resume where anybody would go like, well, that's a really good move.

SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, I love it.

That is hysterical.

So you said though from there you ended up in Los Angeles.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

And I like Los Angeles again because I I always felt that Los Angeles is my soul city where I belong.

That's been recently changing a little bit just because there's just so much activity here and so many people and so much traffic.

But I I like the disjointedness of Los Angeles, and I like the, you know, the being at the beach and being in the mountains in a short amount of time.

Love the weather, needless to say.

And I do like the creativity and just the craziness that that is in this, in this city and opinionated people.

And so I I landed here and then I started my career here as a artist representative for hair makeup and styling.

I was pretty quickly then promoted to run a brand new photography division and started representing photographers.

From there on, I went into photography production, you know, producing, producing shoots, and then all hell broke loose because then this, you know, we had the riots in Los Angeles and a massive, massive recession started.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow, wow.

That's so crazy.

Now, in the photography realm that you were in, I mean, what exactly did that involve?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so around photography, there's always a lot of support services that are where you don't actually take the photos, but photographers need a good amount of support services.

So when I was representing them, I was the one who was running around with the portfolios to the different magazines and the different companies like Ocean Pacific that produces swimsuits.

Too hot Brazil Massimo was one of our clients.

And we had a lot of clients here in the Los Angeles area that were all around the beach lifestyle.

So back then I remember, you know, casting Cameron Diaz when she came in in the studio on Melrose that I had a small, small studio where I did all the castings for my photographers.

And I remember her telling the story on you know her just having been in this movie, in this weird movie with this comedian guy, Jim Carrey, and and uh the mask.

And she said, you know, just finished filming, have no idea what this is going to be.

And that was the last time we saw Keramin Diaz as the model, and then her rocket, rocket launch started.

SPEAKER_02: Wow.

Wow, wow, wow, how cool is that?

Very cool.

Very cool.

Yeah, wow, wow, wow.

Now, so there's something that I read when when I was getting ready for our interview today, and obviously this is going to be having us skip ahead in in your journey because it said that at one point in time you were, I think,$135,000 in debt, a single mother.

And I can't help but wonder what got you to that point.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a WTF question, right?

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Like, girl, what did you do?

You know, I made just some really extraordinary, wonderful mistakes.

I met a man who looked perfect on the outside.

He had two flaws.

He was a pathological liar and an alcoholic, you know, abusive and not physically abusive, but verbally abusive and just completely incapable.

So I married my mother in essence.

And before I knew it, I was I was pregnant and I had a small child.

I'm in this massive recession.

I'm being laid off from this artist representation job.

And we are, you know, we are we're trying to figure out, you know, what's going to continue.

There's been a massive earthquake in Los Angeles right after I had been let go and I had set up my company.

And so here I am, you know, I'm starting a 10-year journey of massive adversity with a with a big bang.

And with this earthquake came the realization that for I was certainly not going to uh spend another day with this person.

And I divorced.

So here I am, a single mother in a city uh where I have no relatives, where it's just me going through a very hostile divorce with a business that I started and that's already in shambles because you know who's gonna come to Los Angeles to produce here or shoot here with this massive earthquake and the rebuilding that we had to do, uh, when the whole earth shakes.

And I just had to figure out how in the world am I gonna make it through that?

And, you know, over the next 10 years, Kevin, like all the stuff that happens to other people just kept happening to me and the betrayal of an employee that that wanted to run her own business, which was my business without me, and went behind my back, joined forces with a key vendor, had invoices that I written, paid to them with lies and fires, floods, riots, earthquake.

I mean, the whole nine yards, and it just kept coming and coming and coming.

And every time I thought I was gonna get ahead, something else would come.

And, you know, and here I am.

I'm I'm finally then at this point where I'm running a million-dollar business, and I think I've arrived.

Finally, I have arrived.

And the lawsuit settled, and I get my bearings, and that's when I found out about the betrayal from my employee.

And I literally in a day lost a half a million dollars when they did what they did, was involved in this lawsuit that lasted for an entire year, just as I'm thinking the production season rolls around, and I have another half a million dollars in productions on the book, which at least would would make me survive possibly this lawsuit for a little bit longer.

And then September 11th came and it wiped out my production business in 24 hours.

And here I am.

I don't even know how in the world am I gonna do this with one piece of my business completely destroyed because of them, the other part of my business completely destroyed because of because of a terrorist attack.

And, you know, and then given the lawsuit settles, and I get to wipe out my debt, pay my attorney, and I start with literally zero.

I think I had like five dollars in my bank account after I paid all my debt.

And now I have this idea for the stock photography syndication, and I'm going back into debt to build this business.

And that's what eventually brought me to the$135,000 in debt again, and it's game over because I have no more money.

You know, I can't even borrow any more money to pay interest on borrowed money.

I'm it's game over, I'm done.

You know, so that's that's the point that I arrived at.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow, wow.

And I want to touch on one thing that that you kind of said a little bit ago, and and it stuck with me, is the fact that you don't have family support where you're living.

No.

As somebody myself, I know that that family is is so important and so vital.

But you you didn't have anybody.

SPEAKER_00: No, I did not.

And you know, and and this is sort of an interesting thing because remember, I I left Germany to get away.

Yes.

And I I picked the furthest place on the planet.

I could, I don't think uh from a mild perspective, I could be any further away from from where all the stuff happened.

But with that, obviously, you know, came that my brother and my sister are still there, my father was still there, and yeah, and so here I am.

Either I'm gonna, you know, pull the tail between my legs and I make my way back over to Germany and I arrive defeated, which certainly wasn't an option.

I'd rather die than doing that.

Or I was going to figure out how I was gonna make this work.

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

So I have to ask, what was the turning point?

SPEAKER_00: Well, I wished I could tell you that, you know, that there was a turning point at that point.

It just got a lot worse because then, you know, with$135,000 in debt, I am going to Germany to drum up some businesses at an international conference, setting up contractual agreements to license the materials that we had had the rights to, which was architecture, interior, and celebrity at home photography.

And my father has a stroke.

My father did not have a stroke.

My father had pancreatic cancer in stage four.

So my father had literally only a few weeks to live.

And so my father passes away.

We are in Germany at this picturesque place with a Baroque, you know, 14th century church right behind us and overlooking the whole valley.

And it's the first, you know, it's it's the first week of spring.

And the church bells are ringing.

We literally just had buried my dad, and my phone rings, and I get a call from Los Angeles that this new landlord that bought the facility had just sent us a notice to vacate because my previous landlord, I had a handshake agreement that I was allowed to do a home office, which the new owner, you know, it wasn't in the agreement, so he had found grounds to get rid of me.

So that happens where I'm literally at the grave of my father.

I'm getting I'm getting this phone call so I'm gonna lose the house.

And so the turning point was me breaking down, falling on my knees, raising my fist against the sky, and yelling at God.

And I said, Look, if you have a plan, would it be an excellent time to fill me in?

Because it just wasn't normal that one person would be going through all these different things all at once.

And and then I had to surrender to this and let it let it go and say, How do I get myself out of this?

How do I, what else is there?

And there literally was nothing else came in that I could have done.

I've gotten all the money out that I could get out.

I did everything I could, I wrote a business plan at night.

I just didn't know what else to do.

And so I had to, I had to surrender to it and say, well, if this is the end of it, if I'm going bankrupt, so be it.

I I literally couldn't do anything else.

I've come back to Los Angeles.

And then not too long thereafter, I get a letter from the White House, from the President of the United States.

Now, the reason I got a letter from the White House is because in my absolute desperation, and because my former mother-in-law was an absolute nag, is she told me to write a letter to the president of the United States.

If anybody can help you, it's the president of the United States.

He's the number one guy in the country.

Why don't you go right to the top?

Why are you wasting your time?

And on and on and on, did you write the letter yet?

So I just wrote the letter just to get, just to not have these conversations with her anymore.

And then I get a letter from the White House.

And now the story turns and it turns on a dime where I get invited to the small business administration because they also got a letter from the White House.

And the second in command, not some underling, but the second in command, wants to see who this nut case is and writes a letter to the president instead of picking up the phone and calling him directly, which never even occurred to me, Kevin.

SPEAKER_02: Of course.

SPEAKER_00: And so as I'm sitting there, he says, I'm gonna put in what you put in.

I said, and then for the first time in a long time, I had hope.

And now with that, I realized that I was gonna be very close to making this happen.

And they found me a bank that restructured my debt in a 10-year fixed loan that freed up my line of credit, the$45,000 in cash that I needed.

I was at break-even three months later, 18 months later, I'm the world leader in my category.

And then a Bill Gates company comes and says, How did you do what you do?

Can you tell us?

And I said, Absolutely not.

If you want it, you buy it.

Yes.

And they said, How much do you want?

I said, a couple million, and they said, fine.

And so that's how I sold my business.

18 months of the worst moment of my life for millions of dollars to Bill Gates.

SPEAKER_02: So that was 18 months later.

Isn't it amazing how fast things can change, both for the negative and the positive?

SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, people always talk, Kevin, about quantum leaps.

I think this qualifies.

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

Yes.

I I I would say so.

Oh my goodness.

Wow, wow, wow.

Now that is just that is just absolutely incredible.

I have to ask, did you have to grit your teeth when you had to call and and say thank you to what was it?

Your was it

SPEAKER_00: You know, that didn't even like occur to me until much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much later, because you know, other things happened.

And but yes, I I hold in my heart a very deep gratitude for her.

And I believe we need to look at this if we are saying, you know, what are the lessons here to be learned?

Is people always go, God help me, God help me, God help me, God send me a sign.

And then they send you a sign in the form of a nagging former mother-in-law, and you go, No, that's not the sign I wanted.

Can it be like a hot guy with a six-pack, you know, in a nice car?

No, that's not how these things work.

When you get the support or the help that you are asking for, it never comes in a form or shape that you have asked for because you don't know what you ask for.

God works in its own ways.

And then it's up to you to take this and say, if I lean into the yes, which in spiritual work we say a lot of times, you need to lean into the yes, and you don't know what that means until because you know, leaning into the yes in this particular, they would have been leaning into a nagging former mother-in-law, and who wants that?

Nobody.

But then when you do and you do these things, that's where the magic happens.

So this is also about not judging the path that unfolds for you.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, before I ask you of what you did with your millions from Bill Gates, I want to ask.

I read on your website that you you talk about failing your way to success.

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think we have this idea in life that our life is a series of battles that then eventually lead to the victory.

But we don't really know what that means.

But you are not going to be winning all your battles.

You're gonna lose some of those.

That means you still can win the war and you can be victorious, but we are very attached to our fear of making mistakes.

And a mistake is when you invest in a program and then that was the wrong program, or the guy was a schmuck, or they lied, and you don't get the outcome.

Or somebody says it's easy and then it's not easy, and then it's difficult, and then you are disappointed, or you thought that learning to speak from stage would be the answer to all of your questions, and you realize it's not, or you realize that nobody really cares about your story.

So we we are always up against these things where we are experiencing failures.

I compare this very much to you being in a car and driving and then, or in your case, being driven somewhere and you know, the guy, and the guy kind of knew that he should have updated the GPS because the warning, you know, new software available has been has been flashing for a long time.

And for some reason that just wasn't done.

And inevitably, now they're building a freeway on ramp and in your favorite shortcut.

And it's a cul-de-sec.

You can't get anywhere.

There's construction, there's guys with you know, with the reflective suits and hard hats.

And so now, so now you're gonna get out of the car, you're gonna throw yourself on the ground, you're gonna throw a temper tantrum, you're gonna go, oh my god, I'm such a failure, I'll never drive another car again, or my God, the guy's such an idiot.

I can't believe I got in the car with him.

What a loser.

He has no idea where he's going.

You know, these idiots, they're taking things away from me.

How dare they?

There's nobody ever.

You just go, you get back in the car, you, you know, you like wave at guys and ah, yeah, I should have updated my GPS, because you have this clear understanding that the destination, you know, your friend's house or the concert or the party or the event or the conference that you had wanted to go to is still there.

And so it's just that this path has been eliminated to get to your destination.

So it's really not a big deal.

But we do that in life, that when these paths of that will not get us to our destination are exposed, we throw temper tantrums every single time.

And we call ourselves failures and losers.

And, you know, we have self-esteem issues instead of saying, oh, okay, this one's eliminated.

Where's the next one?

Until you find the right one to get there.

That's what I mean with failing your way to success.

If you lose your attachment to the emotion that's attached to failures, you do a hell of a lot better in life.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Oh my gosh, I just loved that explanation of that.

The thing with the GPS in that, that is such a beautiful example of failing your way to success.

I love it.

I love it.

So obviously, the question is now what did you do with the money from selling your business to Bill Gates?

I was wondering if you, you know, quick went off and started just chilling on the beach, drinking margaritas.

Or I kind of feel like you probably took a smarter direction.

SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, so the story goes that I took my daughter and we went to Neiman Marcus and thought, let's go shopping and let's buy the stuff that I was never able to afford.

My I'm looking looking at a t-shirt and looking at the price tag, it's like$200 for a t-shirt.

My daughter's looking at this cool coat from Burberry and it's like$2,500.

And I'm standing there and I'm thinking to myself, there's a really good reason why I never paid$200 for a t-shirt and why I'm really not interested in a $25 coat because it really was meaningless to me.

Absolutely meaningless to me.

And so I let that go.

And I realized that what I did was a prelude to something else.

And then I put myself in service of helping people with shortcuts to make their dreams happen, land planes.

You know, so today I work as a growth architect.

We work with visionaries and thought leaders and help them to scale their impact, grow their authority.

In essence, I help people land planes because, you know, people have some sort of device that flies and then they just don't know where and how to land it.

And they keep circling and circling until they run out of fuel and crash.

And I get on board, you know, hopefully sooner, but before that, and help them to figure out which airport or build their airport and make sure that they achieve the destination or journey that is aligned with who they are and what they are here to do in life.

SPEAKER_02: What do you credit to your not just your success, but your your talent, your gift for this type of work?

SPEAKER_00: I have an ability when I talk to someone to immediately see what the best potential outcome is that they can achieve.

And it takes me 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

It really takes me no time.

And it's part of my intuition because I'm I'm very aligned with my intuition and I trust it.

And so, you know, I was just at a spiritual retreat, and just to give you an example of what that looks like, and I see this young man is like 31 years old.

And I look at him, and immediately in my head, I have an image in my head.

And it's like this beautiful house with an infinity pool.

And for some reason, there's some cement type of features in this house.

And, you know, saying, uh, can I ask you a question?

And he's like, sure, go ahead.

I said, what do you do?

And he says, Oh, yeah, no, I'm I'm kind of in construction, but I'm specialized in cement.

And so I do these very complicated high-end cement features.

And I said to him, You're gonna have a business on your own and you're gonna go and do all these high-end homes.

And I can I and here's an image and I drew it out.

I said, You're gonna be known for the go-to authority to build cement installations that are functional in high-end homes.

Wow.

And he says, Yeah, makes total sense to me.

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: And then, and then, you know, and then I would sit down and I would would look at where he's at.

And so he is part of a construction company where he oversees a team that does all the cement stuff, you know, and then figure out do you want to go on your own?

Are you gonna ask your boss to give you this division to help build this division, become have co-ownership in it, and then build the business model around it and tell him exactly how to build it?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Wow, wow, wow.

That's incredible.

So is that what you would say gives you the title of a growth architect?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, growth architecture just means that I have developed a blueprint on how you build something.

I mean, I've been doing this long enough.

I certainly have the shortcuts.

You have the ideas, I have the shortcuts.

So I can look at the idea and I can tell you if it's a good idea.

I can tell you if there's if I believe there's market demand for this idea.

And I can tell you what I think the earning potential for this particular type of work is, because I've been doing it for so long.

And I I see the pattern and and what you need to have to make it happen.

And then I can diagnose, because I developed the five-star success blueprint, to figure out where you are in your journey, what you may have missed, what you're, you know, I have a quiz at what's your talent worth, where you can actually calculate what your earning potential is with a skill that you have.

It's completely free.

And then when you know how much your earning potential is, then we can go ahead and start building this.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

That's just incredible.

Now there's an there's another side of you.

I I really don't know when you sleep, but I also see that that you actually have written a book as well.

SPEAKER_00: Yes, I've written a book called A Happy Woman, Happy World, how your foolproof fix how to get from overwhelmed to awesome.

That was a book that I wrote as a single working mom to help other single or working moms to figure out how you can have your own life while you are a good parent and manage to be in a good relationship and potentially even have a career.

And it's very difficult for women to do everything equally well because something always suffers.

If you work, you're guilty that you're not at home.

If you're home, you're guilty that you're not working enough.

So women are really caught in an impossible situation.

And so I wrote a book about helping women and helping men understand what women are going through.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, you are so remarkable.

You just literally, I listened to you, and I think to myself, how amazing it is that I listened to your story.

I've only known you for as long as we've been talking.

And yet I see a woman who you came from a childhood that had its its scars left, you know?

And yet the fact that you you found a way, you've made a way very successful.

And I just want to say, first and foremost, like applause to you for just literally taking advantage of every second of every day to to make your dreams come true.

And like I said, I mean, publishing a book is one thing.

But the fact that you publish a book while having a thriving business and also just being a mom in your personal life, I think it's incredible.

SPEAKER_00: One of the things, you know, and coming out of this like spiritual retreat that I was just in, I feel that when we learn on how to take our trauma and the wounds, that we come here to heal.

And instead of being angry and victimized by it and turning the mess into the message, which is not my quote.

That's I don't even know whose quote that is and where I heard this the first time.

But we always have an option to lean into the pain and take that energy and channel it into something that actually creates a path for us.

Because if it's happened to me, it must have happened to other people.

And if it was difficult for me to overcome, other people must struggle with it.

So what am I gonna do with this?

Am I going to be upset at my mother?

My mother doesn't even remember it.

My mother has taken all these memories that are just too painful for her to even admit this ever happened.

I mean, if you go there, Kevin, you know, she'll she'll invite you in the house and she would, you know, want to prove to you on how happy we were.

She's shown friends of mine photo albums and and said, Well, look, in every photo, Beata is very happy.

Therefore, she has had a happy childhood.

You know, and the pink song plays in the background.

In our family photos, we look pretty happy.

So so yeah, there is definitely something in there where you have you can have your circumstances define you, or you define what your circumstances made you be.

And to me, there was not a chance in the world that my mother would be right about anything that she said to me.

unknown: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: I was gonna be in charge of this.

And I am in charge of this.

And I love nothing more than helping other people to figure this out and then just go.

Just go do it.

Just stop thinking about it, stop crying, waiting for one day.

Today is day one.

You're listening to this interview on great grace and inspiration.

Today is day one.

There is no whatever.

The past is where it's at in the past.

Sure, you're gonna need to do your trauma work and somehow manage that and channel that energy into something.

The future hasn't happened.

Whatever you think of yourself as a failure, impostor, and on whether or not you have a right to be here is irrelevant.

What happens and matters is now.

What are you gonna do today?

You're listening to this interview.

You heard my story, you have no more excuses.

If I can turn myself out of this into a self-made multimillionaire with everything that I was up against, so can you.

SPEAKER_02: So do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

My last question for you another little sound bite, little snippet I I pulled off of your website, which I can't help but think that it probably sums up what you've just said is you talk about turning your adversity into authority.

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00: It means exactly that.

It means it takes you, you take your story, you bake your story into a nice little long loaf of bread.

You take a bread knife and you cut it into slices, and you decide which of these pieces you will use to turn yourself into the authority.

So, you know, I have really not talked a lot about my abuse because my mother's still alive, and and it is important for me that I'm respectful to that, not for her, but for me, because that is how I want to show up in the world.

But it did happen.

And so that part of the story is a slice that I really haven't talked about.

But other slices, you know, like my crazy ex-husband, that's a slice I talk about.

So you need to figure out which part of the story of the adversity that you went through becomes your authority because that is, you know, the deep desire to help other people, especially women or people that are considered minorities or are from the get-go a little bit behind.

That's my favorite thing because I have so much compassion for them because of what I went through.

And that's where we that's where we hook in.

How do you turn this into what you're helping other people with?

And I always say to my clients, you know, it's like is what happened to you happening to other people?

Yes.

If it's happening to other people, do you think other people could benefit from the experience that you have?

Yes.

What do you need to give them?

How do you need to package your experience that it will help them to overcome that?

Very simple.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

You have totally blown me away.

You have been such a joy to speak with today.

Thank you so much for sharing your journey, for sharing your wisdom and advice with me, with the person listening today.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you, Kevin.

It's my pleasure.

And for all of you listening, please do Kevin a favor.

Go to wherever you pick up this show and subscribe to it and give it a five-star review with a comment.

And here's why the comment matters so much, because the comment shows the algorithm that what is being talked about on the show is really landing with you, the listener.

And it is a labor of love to do a podcast.

And so give Kevin a little bit of love back so he can give more love to more people.

SPEAKER_02: Aw, thank you so much.

I appreciate that.

And for you listening today, as always, thank you for being here with me, getting to have another just incredible conversation with just the amazing people in the world.

I always say that that's the best thing about having a podcast, I get to meet people who I never even would have known existed.

So all of your links to your book, to your website, to your podcast, everything will be inside of today's show notes for easy access.

With that, get out there and enjoy today.