Ep 113 How to not crap your pants when you're live launching a course

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Show Transcription: 

Welcome to Episode 113 of her Empire Builder podcast. Okay, so I have a confession to make. I am doing this episode for myself, for myself, and for you, because this was not on the schedule. But I finished last week setting up our launch for next month. So next month, we open the doors to her Empire Builder mastermind, and it's amazing. I really, you know, humbly think it's the best value mastermind in the world.

But when I finished making the sales page, and then creating the lead magnet funnels, and the webinar funnels and all the things that go with a beautiful launch, I sat back and was like, Oh my gosh, what is this emotion? I am literally crapping my pants.

It's still a month away, and I'm so nervous. And I went into my house after. And my husband said, What's going on with you? You look weird. And I was like, I've just finished setting up for launch, and I'm starting to get nervous. He's like, Oh, my gosh, Tina, the downside of you being so organised, is it's 30 days out. What's about three weeks? About three weeks out? And do I have to deal with this for the next three weeks, and then one week of launch, which means like four weeks of you being this highly strong nightmare?

Like, um, little bit? Yeah, a little bit. Sorry, I decided to make this episode. And it's not my most nice named episode, how to not crap your pants when launching. But I think it's something that everybody who has launched online courses can associate with, because it's ridiculous how vulnerable you are when you are promoting a business through a personal brand. And how

that can actually feel, especially for people that what I find is people that serve really, really well like, go to the ends of the earth to serve their customers so beautifully, are usually people who have acquired that skill, because they've tried to seek the validation of other people. And so by serving people so incredibly well, they get thanked, and loved and adoration from others. And that's what makes them so good at what they do. But at the same time doing intensive launches, is what makes you feel like, Is everyone gonna love me? Or is everyone gonna hate me? And am I going to be a winner? Or am I going to be a loser? And there are all of these extremes that go with it. If you hear some background, noise, scratching, things like that, while this episode is on, I got a new puppy this week.

And she's next to me. And hopefully she settled enough. But if you hear noise, that's what it is. It's Marlo my new sheepadoodle.

All right, alright, let's talk about launching.

What I want to say is that I teach people to launch, I have a mastermind in which we are all going through online courses. We're building that through personal brand, what I focus on is the business behind the online course because a lot of people think it's just about the online course. But it's actually you can create the best course possible. But if you're the world's best kept secret, it doesn't matter. It's all about the business behind the online course and the marketing that goes with that in the branding. Anyway, I do teach launching for a living.

And so a part of me always felt like I should never admit that I struggled. People would go Hmm, wow. But here's the thing. I don't think it is for anyone unless you are like hardcore narcissist, or you don't have to be tied to the outcome anymore. You can literally whether you sink or swim, it absolutely does not matter. And this is the thing, I think it feels like a massive deal. Because it is there is often so much riding on it, especially if you're the breadwinner of the family. So, for me, my husband works now, but he works in my business. And before that he had seven years off. So I've been for seven years, the breadwinner of our family. So it's not like I have a fallback to go, you know what, if this doesn't go? Well, it's okay. Because it's literally when you're doing a live launch strategy in your business. It's amazing. And I am much more of a fan of live launches, than having only evergreen funnels, running through your online programmes because you get so much traction from a live open close cart launch.

But it means that with my her Empire Builder mastermind programme that we're launching next month, we only open twice a year, eight days, twice a year. So if I fuck that up, it means I have a whole other six months, before I get the chance to do it again. So I can tell myself all sorts of things and going you know what, it's not a big deal. Don't be tied to the outcome, all of that sort of thing. But my subconscious knows, that's bullshit. And so I'm not a big fan of trying to bullshit yourself with positive affirmations. I think it's better to be a realist and go, you know, what, how can we do the best we can with this situation. And, yes, be tied to the outcome. Because we need the outcome. There is no point in saying you know what, I'm not going to be tied to the outcome. If it means that if you don't do well, you can't pay your mortgage, and you can't pay your bills, and you can't buy food. So I think there's a certain element where it's not helpful to lie to yourself, but it is helpful to be able to tell yourself the things that are going to help you get through it with the energy that you need to show up with, because running a positive, successful launch is all about the energy that you show up with. And if you get psyched out and get too much in your head, then that energy is not going to be there, which means that the launch isn't going to be as good and it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. And so let me go through how to do that and how not to crap your pants when you're launching.

So the biggest thing is to remind yourself, this isn't make or break. This isn't the biggest deal.

It is a big deal. And it's important. And we're going to put all of our best energy and best self into it. But it's not the be all end all. So why why I say that is, like I just said before, I'm not a fan of lying to yourself, because you will know.

But it isn't make or break. The thing is, even though I said yes, we do a live launch, we don't get to do it for another six months. If I fall short. There are many different things that I can do to create revenue in that six month period. And there are many things that you can do. You have your skill set, you have your expertise, you can run live workshops, you can do master classes, you can do pop up courses, you can do all different things. In between, that, if the worst happens, and you end up with a big lie in your head.

There are different things that you can do to survive. It is not make or break. It's a big deal. And it's important, but it isn't the biggest deal. So I think, you know, we really need to remember that, that often. The worst case scenario does not come true.

But if it does, we're gonna be just okay. And so we may as well have fun with it. The other big thing that I and like I said at the beginning, I'm recording this episode for the things that I need to remember, as well as the things that I want to be able to share with you. And one of the things that I need to get over every launch is to let go of judgement and expectation.

So one of the things that I have I actually found it easier to fail, when I was smaller, now that I have some semblance of success, and I know there are people looking at me for the way that things should be done, I feel that weight of pressure so hugely on my shoulders and go, you know, what if this doesn't work, and if I fall? Well, short of expectations, it's going to be like doubly worse, because everyone's gonna go, Oh, my God, the chick that's supposed to teach us how to do launches, has to stuffed up her launch. But you know what? I won't, I'm always going to do the best that I possibly can, at the time. And so there's no point in actually taking up any brain space with the fear of that expectation, because other people's opinions actually don't matter. If I know I've done the best that I possibly can. So I want you to go into lunch with that sort of scenario and going, how can you do the best that you can? And how can you make yourself proud? And then absolutely, nothing else matters. Because the next thing is to succeed, you have to go all in on all the things. And people in my mastermind joke with me all the time about how often I say all the things.

But it's amazing how many times like it comes into play and going, you know what, you got to do all the things, all the bigs because it's not one thing. So, you know, one of the most common questions I get asked is, what's the one thing that has contributed to your success, or anything like that, and it's not one thing, it's all the things that magically fade into the web of each other. So whenever someone joins my high level mastermind programme, I ask them after, like, how, how did you get to know me, because no one's going to join my mastermind, unless they know me, and they trust me. And so that has to be built over time. So usually, it's multiple touch points. Usually it's through through this podcast. But it's also through masterclasses and sore throats. Also through webinars, it's also through friends recommending me it's through multiple, multiple things. It's through speaking at different people's business groups, it's usually lots of different things that people have seen and heard me on, that make people go, you know what, this is someone that I want to work with. But then when it's launching, there are people watching that you don't even know are there.

So every time I launch, I get people joining my programme and my programmes on cheap programmes, I do high level programmes. So my cheapest product at the moment is $1,000. So people will come to me, and I've never seen them before. I've never seen their name before. I don't know them, but they know me. And so what I want you to know is that there are a lot of people out there who are being inspired by you right now, there are people who are listening, there are people who are watching, there are people who are paying attention, trying to decide whether or not to work with you in the future. And so when it comes time for this launch period, and especially if you only do it two, three, or max four times a year, if you go all in on all the things, then those people who have been watching and waiting, will be ready. But if you don't do all of those things, if you have asset, then they won't get that opportunity to work with you. So you want to go in full class.

And so what I mean by all the things actually, if you want the launch checklist, go to Tina tower.com, forward slash checklist that lists out all the things that I'm talking about. And I will talk to people who are mid launch and they're like, you know what, I'm not entirely happy with it yet. And I'll go Okay, have you got the checklist? Are you going through everything? Have you been doing a daily live? I've done it a couple of times, but not every day. Have you done a webinar? No, I'm not I'm, I'm a little scared of during the webinar. I think I'll do that next time. Have you done affiliates? No, I'm not quite ready for that yet. Here's the thing. If you don't do all the things you won't do as well. It's as simple as that. If you want a great result, you have to do everything that you need to do in order to get that great result. It doesn't happen by accident. It happens on purpose. When you are bold enough to get out there and to do all the things say he would get here's the things that I want to tell you.

Is have fun with it. Life is supposed to be fun. Life is supposed to be joyous and too often we get stuck in our heads and forget that and

For me, I am an extremely joyous person, I'm very generally enthusiastic about life, as you could say. But when it comes to launching, I go on the roller coaster of emotions just like everybody else does. And it's usually you know, when you're open, you've got that massive excitement of the unknown what's gonna happen, Oh, my gosh, here we go. And then it gets like day two, and three. And usually on that morning, I will cry. And I will go, Oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen, I have no idea how we're going to do this. And I'm a control freak. So the depth of uncertainty and a launch really is a struggle for me. And so how I do best is to have fun with it. And to do that each day of launch, we actually plan how are we going to have fun today? So how are we going to welcome the new members, that's how we came up with the bell idea. So whenever we get a new member, we ring our bell, and welcome people with that. And so we can send off positive vibes into the universe for them, and thank them and welcome them in. And it just starts this beautiful momentum. And so I want you to think about with your launches, how can you have fun with that? What different elements can you introduce, that means every day, you are having fun, you feeling joy with the process. And then another thing is remembering that your self worth is not tied to the outcome. And this is a big one in going often, because online courses are promoted with personal brand, they're grown with personal brands, humans buy from humans, it is really hard to disconnect your self worth from the outcome. But the only way that you will be able to thrive in the environment is to disconnect it is to know that people will not join your programme for all manner of reasons, like all manner of reasons that you can't even imagine that it actually very little has to do with you. And so you need to not tie that self worth to the outcome of how the launch goes. If you smash it out of the park. Does it mean you're the most exceptional person in the world? No. If you fall well short of your expectation, does it mean that you are not worthy, and you're just a big giant loser? No.

And so we really need to be conscious of that of not tying self with it. And looking at it all, as a curious experiment. So this launch that I've just planned coming up is about my 15th launch live launch. So you'd think that I'd have it all sorted by now. But you know what, I'm an emotional, emotional human, which I think is what makes me so good at what I do. But it also is a one of the hard parts that I have to continually work on, to be able to thrive in an environment where I feel like myself where it is completely tied to my success as a businesswoman. So I have to remind myself, it's a curious experiment, if something works if something doesn't work, okay, what can we do? What can we tweak? What are these levers that we need to measure and be able to adjust in order to do better next time in order to serve more people in order to reach more people in order to deliver more value to more people. And so it's all an experiment in being able to do that. And then the next thing I want to tell you is, you know yourself better than anybody. So the internet can judge hear, anyone can judge you. People will listen to you, people will hear you, and people will judge you when people say you know, people are only thinking of themselves, they're not judging you. Yeah, that's not true.

Yes, people are thinking of you in relation to themselves, and how they interpret themselves in comparison to you, which is not great. We want to avoid comparison itis. But I know you've done it, you've looked at other people, and you compared yourself to them. And other people are doing it to you as well. And I want you to know who you are, isn't affected by other people's perceptions of you, you know, you you know what you do when nobody's watching, you know, your worth, and you know, your value, you know, your unique blend of awesome. So the only way I had this question today from one of my members in my group, actually in terms of people copying them, and it happens, it happens all the time. I could do a whole episode on people copying. But the thing is, you've got your own unique blend of awesome that cannot be copied. And so you need to know who you are, what you stand for the value that you bring, and then just forget about the rest. Focus on your customers, not someone else's. So it's really hard when you're launching or you're preparing to launch and you're looking at other people and you going, Oh my gosh, they're doing that thing. I wanted to do that thing. Now I can't do that thing, oh, can I do that thing or they did that thing and they did it better than me, oh, you're gonna compare yourself all the time. But you know what? This plenty of fish in the sea, we live in the most beautiful abundant world of billions of people on the planet, that often to run a really good, profitable, impactful business, you need to be able to serve hundreds, maybe a couple 1000 of clients.

Not billions, there are plenty to go around. So don't focus on someone else and other people's customers focus on your customers and keep your strategy simple. Just serve your customers really well go where they are. It's very, very easy. Go like this very little strategy around it and goin.

There's very little strategy around it in going. keep it really simple. Where are your beautiful, beautiful customers? Where are they? What are they listening to, and go there, go where they're at, give them what you've got, be open and honest and be yourself. This is a big thing. Because the more you are yourself, the more successful you will be. And that is a hard thing at the beginning. Because you're not super comfortable in who you are in confidence, especially if you haven't been on camera before, or you haven't, like let your voice be heard. I know like right now I'm 113 episodes in the podcast. And this is my second podcast. So I've done this many, many times. And I know in the early days of podcasting, I would never just hit record and do an episode like this where I'm literally just, I don't know what I'm going to say, I'm just talking about how not to crap your pants when launching. But I'm comfortable enough now. To go. I may say some things that later, I think oh, Tina, you shouldn't have said it like that you should have said it like this. Or Oh, I don't know whether you ever really should have said that. But the nature of podcasting is so that you can share thoughts that help people think and this is the thing, what I want you to do from this episode today is to be able to think about you and think about your launch and go How can you get more joy in it? How can you get more impact in it? And how can you have an easier time through the process.

And so with the nerves, let's let's talk about the nerves, because you are in evidently going to feel nervous, the most confident people that I know, still feel nervous before they hit go on a webinar, they still feel nervous when they hit open cart and change it from a waitlist to being open and available. And you're always going to have that moment where you're going, Oh my gosh, what if nobody buys? But my darling, it's going to be okay. Remember, you've trained for this moment, you are ready. And whatever happens. It's a curious experiment. So if it goes really well, awesome, double down on that. If it goes short of your expectations, it's going to give you so many lessons that you can take and tweak and do better next time. One of the best and the worst things about launching live programmes is that you never know what's going to happen. And so like I mentioned before, I'm quite a control freak, which regular listeners will know. And one of the hardest parts of launching online courses is that you actually don't know what's going to happen. So I am a numbers and systems go I drilled down on the results quite heavily and work out what is the conversion from webinar? What is my conversion from Instagram lives? What are all of the different results that I can get from all of the different things and so I'm pretty clued in to what my numbers are and what my expectations are. But every single launch even 15 launches later, it's still so incredibly different. Sometimes, I can totally exceed expectations and go, What on earth just happened there?

And then other times I can not and go oh my gosh, What on earth happened there? And the correlation usually is that it has to do with my energy that I bring not in terms of energy of like, Am I tired or am I vibrant? But how am I feeling psychologically? So am I feeling you know, that overwhelm from being too tied to the outcome that overwhelm from going, Oh my gosh, if this doesn't do well, what is going to happen in the following few months or what are people going to think or what is it

I'm starting to literally pack it before it even happens. And so one of the biggest things that I remind myself when going into launch now is I always love setting in terms of like, it's one of my favourite TED talks that Tim Ferriss does is called fear setting, which is looking at a situation and going imagine every worst possible scenario, and then what would happen if that came true? And how do you mitigate it? And then how do you recover from it if it actually happens. So that is a super helpful exercise. But then I also go, once I've done that fear setting exercise, I go, it hasn't happened. So I'm not going to give that any energy, I'm not going to give that any space, I'm going to operate as if it's the perfect execution of the perfect launch. And I do not let go of that until the final second clicks over on the launch, because you never know what's going to happen. So an example of my like when I launched Empire builders in June, and we had 32 new people into that programme in that intake. And so it was a great launch. I wanted 20. So we we exceeded expectation with that. But what happened was the morning of the closing, we had 16 people.

So we've been open for eight days, we had 16 people, I was for short of my lowest goal, and ended up finishing at 32. So you never know what's going to happen. And part of that lost a rush, I think comes from I believe they're coming. There's no kind of pot on mine where I roll over and admit defeat until the setting clicks over, that the launch is finished. Right until that point, I'm like, Okay, well, that coming. I just don't know who I wonder who it's going to be, that's going to be lucky enough to take big spots. And so I want you to really have the conviction and that self belief in knowing how great your offer is, and knowing the impact and the transformation that you can deliver for people and knowing that your success is inevitable. And it's just a matter of who and when it's not a matter of if so look at each launch and go, Okay, what would it look like? If it was easy? What would your dream launch experience be?

And then how can you create that. So for me, mine is fun, I don't want it to be filled with stress. I actually my goal for this launch in March is no tears.

Which, you know, for people that know my backstory know that, you know, I came from quite a tumultuous past. And I recovered from my childhood in my adolescence by kicking ass in the business world. And it was where I felt like I had come into my own and where I felt like I was actually worth something as a human. And so when I feel like that is threatened, it can be really hard to stay level headed.

But I don't want that anymore. I am okay. Now, even if I am like the biggest failure loser with the next launch, where, okay, I can still pay my bills, I can still do all of that. So it's got that pressure off. And if you're not in that situation where you are the breadwinner, and you have to make a certain amount of money. That's okay. You get that you do it. work out what would it look like if it was easy, and then focus all of your energy on that and remember that it is a big deal, but it's not the biggest deal. So my launch is to have fun. I really want to have fun. I want it to be joyous. I want it to have great energy throughout. Above all else, I want the connection. So my favourite thing about launching is how connected I get to people in terms of I do all the things like I mentioned before. So I'm on different people's podcasts. I'm doing Instagram lives. I'm doing Facebook Lives, I'm doing clubhouse rooms, I'm doing like all the things, messaging people on messenger and DMS and everything that you can imagine is kind of like you know what, I do it because this is important, and I want to do the best that I absolutely can because I know that when people come into my programme, they get incredible results and I want that for people. And so I have really good connection and I love that it's my favourite thing. But to be able to have the time and the space for that connection, I need to chill the fuck out.

And so I've got to really remember to keep the energy light to keep it joyous, to not make it heavy. And then once you get to that spot, the ease is in the momentum. So the momentum starts flowing and the energy starts growing. And then you get this beautiful surge, that's unstoppable. That's just like, Oh my gosh, look at everyone coming to this party, this is fantastic. And then once that hits, the success is completely inevitable. But a lot of people don't actually get there because they don't get over that I'm crapping my pants stage. And so what I want you to do is figure out what would that dream launch experience look like? What are all the things that you can do? So if you want to run webinars, if you want to do lives, if you want to have your voice heard, so that you can reach your target market, so that you can give the opportunity to that perfect customer to be able to work with you, then you've got to go do those things. And the only way we can do those things is to get out of our head, get out of our own way, and to show up as our best self. And to show up as our best self. It's not in the space of crapping their pants, it's in the space of going, you know what we're going to be okay, no matter what happens, this too shall pass good or bad, it's going to be alright. And we're going to be absolutely exceptional.

So let me know, Instagram, my Instagram is Tina underscore tower. I want to know what scares you most when you're launching.

And let me know if you kind of had a thought from today and going, I'm going to let go of this. I'm not going to do this anymore, because I want to enjoy the launch experience because it's there to be enjoyed. Already you guys. Hopefully that has helped.

Hopefully, you're not judging me too much for still crapping my pants while I launched. But when you see me and this is the strange thing of podcasts and always being honest in the in the kind of podcasting scenario is going,

you're gonna see me launch in a few weeks and you're going to be going, I know these are the thoughts that are going through her head.

So while I'm launching, feel free to send me a message and go, Tina, remember, keep it light. Have fun with it. It's okay, we're all gonna be okay. And we're all gonna be okay together. Have a great day. Go be awesome.