The Long Game

#98 - The Long Game (EDITED)

Sat, Oct 05, 2024 8:58AM • 22:15

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

freedom and adventure, business travel, self care, guest interviews, Aboriginal acknowledgment, long game, book launch, project milestones, social media gratification, terminal illness, audio book, website rebranding, sustainable business, event planning, money mindset

SPEAKERS

Emma Lovell

Emma Lovell 00:00

Emma, do you want to live a life of freedom and adventure? Are you wanting more than the daily grind? Me too. Welcome to the Emma Lovell, show a place where we talk about living a life you love. Now I'm your host, Emma Lovell, and my number one value is freedom. I've spent the last 14 years running a business and traveling the world, and now I take my husband and toddler along for the adventure too. It's possible, and I know you can create a life doing what you truly love as well. This podcast will inspire, motivate and encourage you to go after your dreams, to create a life you love and to live it now, not wait for a time and or someday in the future, I'll be sharing episodes weekly about how I harmonize business travel and self care. I'll also bring on incredible guests to share their journeys, the wins, the challenges, and how they're creating a life they love. Let's jump in and get dreaming. This is a space for you to manifest a life you love. I would like to acknowledge and recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this place, now known as Australia. I am grateful for the continuing care of the land, waterways and skies where I work, live, listen, learn and play from here on Yugambeh country and from wherever you are listening, I pay my respects to the elders past and present. Hello and welcome to today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am Emma Lovell I'm the host of the Emma Lovell show. Just in case you missed the intro, but it's always good to reintroduce yourself. Thank you for listening. If this is your first ever episode, and if you've been here for, I don't know, we're up to about 97 now, if you've been here for all of those, thank you so very, very much. We'll be celebrating our 100th episode in the coming weeks, and that's going to be so much fun to share with you all. So today I wanted to talk about the long game. The long game. I'm not going to lie, I haven't really played the long game for a lot of my business. I tend to operate in a mode of feast or famine, so all or nothing, and I tend to be very excited and driven by action and what's next. So what has been interesting, though, is realizing that I have actually been in the game, been in the business game for 15 years this September, so just celebrated my 15 years in business, and I had a party on the night, which was amazing. I've never had a party to celebrate my business anniversaries, but it's a great thing to do. I coincided that with my book launch as well. So my book, The Art of pleasure, my first ever book, came out on the 23rd of August, and 2024 and I think doing that process of writing the book and looking back and reflecting upon my, not only my entire business career, but my entire life for some parts of the book, then also to commit to a project that I 100% knew was going to take, well, you know, a solid six months, but probably A year. You know that that's playing the long game, and you really have to map that out and have project milestones. And not only was it going to be a year to get the book launched, I gave myself a year. But, you know, then committing to a year, or two years of talking about that book, using that book in other ways, and it's been such an interesting journey, and it's something that I'm trying to remind myself, and I guess I want to impart, is that, you know, this is a long game. Our lives are long games, our work is long game, and our goals are long games, and sometimes they come into fruition a lot quicker than we think. But I think that we're sort of in this day and age where we want everything now, and you want your rewards now, and you want the gratification now. And in some ways, you get that through things like social media. And you know, we want to order something, we order it online, and it comes in two days. We're not used to waiting and and the anticipation and writing it out, and that's something that I've really had to learn along this way, and I'm so proud that the book actually happened on time. It's quite known in the publishing industry that books tend to, I don't know, stretch out and can take longer than anticipated, and things like that. So I wouldn't have been surprised if that had happened, but I really was hopeful that we could get it through in the time that we. Planned, and so to have to hold the book on the 21st of August, to then launch the book on the 23rd of August at a party, and to hold that in my hands, and for it all to be real, was such a celebration. But what I'm, I guess I'm struggling with at the moment, is slipping back into that short term view and wanting to do it all now, there were some things that I committed to in the book and that I would like to be having, such as an audio book and a course that, and also a website, a new website that would hold all of these things, and I really thought that we could have all of those things done by August. But life happens, and life happened in a big way to me and around me, where my nephew Louis passed away on the ninth of July, which he had been ill for 18 months. We had known of his terminal illness for 18 months. So that could have happened at any time, and that happened in that in that period. And so I was forced to only focus on. All I could focus on was actually the book my grief and my my husband's son, and my health. If there was anything that fell outside of that, I just didn't have room for it. I had no capacity. So, yeah, that was a tough a tough time, but things like the audiobook that I thought I could do in July already was looking unrealistic, just simply in that you need five days or so, as my lovely audio producer shares with me, to actually record the thing. You know, I'm recording a podcast now, and even that, you know, if I record three or four podcasts in a day, that's three or four hours, or at least two to four hours of talking takes a lot out of you, and you're going to stumble and you're going to mess up words and things like that. So I need to have some solid time to do that. So I had to surrender that and push it back. It'll absolutely happen, and it's just that, you know, this book's going to be around for a long, long time. And so the good thing will be that, you know, even the ebook, The eBook took a week or so after we thought that it was funny, the ebook was ready, but to get it listed and published on the sites, it was actually the printed book came out faster than the ebook. So that was quite funny. So people were asking me for that, for that, and we didn't have it quite yet. But what's great about that then is there's a second chance to announce it. It's the same with the audible or the audio book. When it comes out, we'll have a whole new way to talk about the book and give it a new lease of life then. And and the same with the website, the website we thought would be ready in August, and so that is my Emma Lovell website. So I did go through a rebranding exercise over the past year, stepping into working as my own name, Emma Lovell, instead of lovely communications. And that's when the podcast came out. But at that time, we sort of, we had a website, and we had built things, but over the course of the year, I knew that there was still some things to add. I was really happy with everything we did at the time, and it felt really great. And I was happy with, you know, I guess, the colors and imagery and those sorts of things for now, but it evolved so quickly. This this pleasure life and this pleasure focus, that that the brand and the website that we have currently no longer reflects what we need to be sharing. So I've been working with the designer and and, yeah, these things sometimes take longer than than planned. I haven't really had the capacity to give it, you know, even to give it a review, and so I had to accept again and know that that website's going to live there for a long time afterwards, when we get it right and we do quality work, it's going to be there for a long time. So that's okay. It's just going to be a couple months more than we thought. When you look at it in the bigger picture of, you know, now having a 15 year business, and I plan to be here for at least another 15 years in business. You know, I don't really ever plan to stop being Emma Lovell the business. I hope to be writing books and speaking about those books and talking about those topics and presenting to audiences and helping people through coaching for many, many, many, many years to come. So it helps to look back and see, yes, some things took time, but we're here, and you did it, and I'm sure that you. Goals and projects right now that you're thinking, Oh my gosh. Well, why haven't I done this? Why isn't up there, hurry up or when will this happen? And it does happen, and before you know it, you know I remember starting the am a level show, and I did, I was like, before I know it, I'll be at 100 episodes. I got to 87 on one podcast. I got to 88 on another podcast. This is my third podcast, but I thought, you know, before I know it, I'll be at 100 and in a week or two, that's what we'll be celebrating. And then, you know, before you know it, one of my friends has 300 episodes on her podcast because she's been around for five years. And it's like, cool, you know, that'll be us in a couple of years. And that's, you know, think about all the things we can talk about. There's times where I think, oh my gosh, I want to tell you guys everything. Or we haven't done this and we haven't done that, and it's like, it's time to tell you, and if something's important, it will come back around. I'd love to know what you want to know, whether it's about the writing journey, or it's about the business journey, or it's about more travel episodes. I want to give you that and gosh, when we're definitely not short of stories over here every week, there's so many things happening that there's more and more content and reflections to share.

11:15

Hi, I'm Alicia major. I love working with Emma so much. I've done everything to the cheers of Emma's how to live and love your brand course, open my ass to the power of personal branding. Then I moved on to one on one coaching. Attended multiple of her fabulous photo shoots, and her rest and receive retreats have all been the best time out to rest. Think about all those juicy possibilities, and then wait for you to receive that post retreat goodness

Emma Lovell 11:43

you know, the other thing that I'm finding at the moment is I do get caught up again in that we've had this whirlwind of the book launches, and there was a flurry of sales, and obviously the book coming out, and there was a flurry of sales, and then things at some point do slow down a little bit. And so then that's where the promotion piece, and the promotional machine has to keep up going, and I have a few other events coming up, but I'm tired. I'm tired. I am tired. And it's been an amazing, amazing seven weeks. It's been more exciting and joyful and heartwarming than I could have ever imagined. But as you probably hear my voice, I'm tired. This week alone, I was in Melbourne. I flew back from the US just a week ago on on the Saturday, I was in Melbourne. On the Monday, I hosted a retreat day on the Tuesday, I had a personal stylist shopping session on the Wednesday, and then that night, I hosted my book launch. In the morning, I flew to Sydney, and that night, I had an awards ceremony to attend at the UTS the UTS Alumni Awards, which was profoundly full circle and just rewarding and inspiring to see what other graduates and alumnus had done, and to meet some incredible people that night, and to say, you know, one day I'll be on that stage. One day I want to be on that stage, and both as a MC and as a new recipient, just putting that out to the universe. And you know, there's just so many opportunities. And as well, these people had been doing their careers for a long time, and I thought it's a long game. I don't need to win every award and go to every event and do everything even though that was the week that I was having, it was like, Okay, wow. Okay, I can I have this message of, you know, you don't have one day someday. Don't stop waiting for one day someday in the future. But on the flip side of that, there also is time, and I would rather I've, you know, this has been a period of doing a lot of things, and with reason, because that's what launching a book and launching a new a new offering is. It's, there is an intensity time, but I want to be sustainable, and I want to do this for a long time, and I want to be talking about this book for a year, two years, 10 years. So I don't want to burn out on that either, and I'm thoroughly still enjoying it, but I've made the decision. I've got two more events coming this year. I've got 16th of October in Brisbane, and I will have a event in Adelaide on the 20th of November. We're just looking down the venue, and as soon as we have that, I will announce it everywhere. Very excited to get to my Adelaide crew. But, you know, I thought I could get to Perth this year. There was another there's a small bookshop I was looking at attending in a regional town. I'm still talking to one other bookshop. But, you know, all of that takes energy and effort and promotion, and it's, it can be a lot. And so I'm like, You know what? Let's stress. Let's save some dates for next year. Let's get over to Perth and Canberra and Darwin and Townsville. Who else wants me? Hobart, who wants me? And where do I want to go? That will cover all the states, which would be amazing. You know, I want to get to. The sort of big cities and and see people and really enjoy it, embrace it. And so, you know, why do an event twice a week for eight weeks to cover everything? Why don't I do once or twice a month for the next year? And I could go to so many wonderful places and do so many wonderful things. So I'm excited to think about what that looks like and how I can stretch that out and slow it down a little bit. Yeah, and yeah. I think the other thing that I'm thinking in the reminder to myself, as well as to you, is, you know, sometimes we can get caught up into as well. Obviously, we need to make money. We need to make money as businesses. We need to make money as people. And although it's been amazing, amazing to have sales so consistently, there's still that, that thing of I still have expenses. I still have a business to run. And of course, I invested in this amazing, big thing. And so then I get this pool to be like, okay, create another thing. Sell, another thing. Sell, sell, sell, bring in that income. And you know that that again, it all takes energy. And so it's, it's trying to remember myself that this is a long game, this amazing, thing that I've created is already producing income. And it is such a joy to wake up or just to randomly get an email being like, you've sold a book yesterday. I finally we listed my book on the house of prose, and I'm going to an event on the 12th of October up in Mullaney for House of prose about the Writer's Guide to the Galaxy, and I'll be speaking on a panel there, but I listed on their website, which is for self published authors. And that same day I was I my book sold on there, which is so amazing that, you know, there's all these different portals and ways that people can buy my things, you know, access my services, because even reading the book is a way to receive my my insights and my knowledge and and learnings, and that there's other ways that they can work with me in the future, and then that that will come. And I'm just thinking about the long game, and I'm going to spend the next few weeks getting back I'm at home, which is so nice. Currently at home cuddling my cat in my lounge room. And I'm just looking forward to really getting a little bit more strategic, thinking about what that looks like the next three, 612, months ahead. And I've even booked in for a planning day with the fabulous Tina tower in December with as part of the her empire builder program. And I'm really looking forward to that and being really kind of mindful and strategic about about how I put things out into the world and how I use my time. And certainly this time has just been a little bit of a, you know, just take opportunities and be there while you can. But I look forward to planning in some more buffers and some more rests and downtime so that I do have the energy to do all these wonderful things. So a few reminders in this episode for you, remember, it's a long game. Life is a long game. The business is a long game. Work is a long game. How can you take care of yourself, and how can you think about things in terms of projects? And we have a wonderful episode coming up with real about real project leadership, with Jeanette cremore. So that'll be a good one to listen to. But how can you also, you know, stop and realize, wow, I've actually achieved quite a lot, and that sometimes that took a little while to get there, but when we stop and celebrate it and go, Okay, things are happening, I'm doing things, and it's okay if they just take a little bit longer than I expected, but I will get there and it's happening. It was the other reminder for this came at I was at TASH corbin's heart centered business conference, and I looked up at the stage and there was Denise Duffield Thomas, one of my fabulous mentors, money mindset, Leonie Dawson, who's a rainbow unicorn, magical person of business. She's been in the game 20 years. Denise has been the game 15 years. Kerry rowett, who's running her business probably 15 years. Rebecca Saunders had run her business for 10 years. Tina tower, she's run her business a number of businesses over 20 years. And also TASH Corbin herself, who's been running a business more than 15 years. And I just was like, yes, it's a long game, and they don't on that stage on the first six months or year of their business, like they're up on that stage sharing their wisdom and sharing from a place of being in it for the longer term, and sharing those lessons. And it's such a great reminder. And. Generally, at the end of a conference, I feel like, oh my gosh, I got to implement everything. And it was really nice to sit, I've been at a few events recently, and to sit in those and to take the learnings and to listen and to know that whatever nuggets and pearls of wisdom come, they'll, they'll come, and I'll, I'll use them in time, but I know what I have to have to be doing at the moment, and I didn't feel that pressure to go out there and create and rush. It was like, Yep, all these things will happen, and I know what I've got to focus on for now, and that very much is the book journey, and it's a long game, and we'll get to do all the other fun things in time. So play the long game, my friend. If I haven't plugged it enough in this episode, please do go and grab your own copy of the art of pleasure. It's available in ebook or printed form. You can get it by my website, Emma lovell.au forward slash book. But you'll also find there where it's listed, places like Amazon, Barnes and Noble Nile QBD books. So find it at your retailers, and there are some printed books out in the world. So I think I'm going to have to list some of those places so people can go and get some photos for me. And if you don't find it in a bookshop or a library near you, please do go and ask for me. Ask, ask for me, and ask for you, for the art of pleasure. And it lets them know that the book is wanted in the world, and they might just get it in for you. So thank you for listening today. And as I said, I really would love to hear what you want to hear more about. So please reach out anytime, and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening. Lovely one. I hope this has inspired you to dream big and start creating a life you love today. If you love what you're hearing, don't forget to follow and rate on Spotify and rate review and subscribe on iTunes. It helps other awesome people to find this podcast and get motivated and inspired as well. Want to stay connected, come and join the live a life you love. Group on Facebook or connect with me on Instagram. Emma lovell.au the same as my website, but all the details are in the show notes. Lovely. I'll see you next episode for more inspiration, motivation and freedom seeking. Now go out there and live a life you love. You.