#129 – December 2024 Income Report

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Hey there, and welcome back to the profitable web designer podcast. And today I'm bringing you my monthly income report for December 2024 and my annual income report for 2024 where I share what happened behind the scenes of the web designer Academy, how much money we brought in, how much went out in, all of the money and business lessons I learned along the way. And if you're new to the show, the reason I write income reports, even though you and I have completely different business models, is because the way we think about money affects all areas of our business. So our thoughts create feelings, which drive our actions, which create our results. And so our thoughts about money will make us feel some type of way which will make us act some type of way which will either create a wanted result or an unwanted result. And if you start paying attention, you'll see how your money thoughts and your core beliefs about money drive certain decisions in your web design business that maybe on the face of things don't seem money related at all. And so I write and publish these income reports to give myself the opportunity to dig into my own money thoughts to see where I might be getting in my own way, and to intentionally give myself more empowering thoughts that will lead me to my big goals. So like I said, this is not only my Month In Review and my year in review, but it's also kind of my decade in review, because 2024 was my 10th year in business. It's hard to believe that I got my first freelance web design gig back in the summer of 2014 on the side of my day job, I was looking back at my numbers, and I made $14,000

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in my business that year in 2014 which was a huge major deal, because at the time, the only money I'd ever made was whatever my employer told me I was worth paying. And maybe I'd get that, you know, 2% cost of living raise each year. Maybe I wouldn't, maybe I'd get a promotion. Maybe I wouldn't, and even just being able to make extra money on top of that was life changing. Even though back then I was still totally under charging, over delivering and operating with an employee mindset, I was able to independently make money, and that was a huge, huge deal. So I'm going to kick off with December's numbers. Then I'm going to dive into our annual numbers for 2024 and a recap of 2024 and I'm also going to talk about some of my reflections on a decade in business, and then I'll wrap it up with what happened and lessons learned in December. So ready. Let's dive into the numbers. So in december 2024 our inflow was $27,135

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and some change. And that included new web designer Academy enrollments from our final open enrollment of 2024 both payment plans and pay in fulls, which I'll talk about a bit later. It also included just regular web designer Academy and Next Level Mastermind payment plans. It included people renewing another year in the web designer academy or another year in the web designer or in the Next Level Mastermind, and two gold level sponsorships for our 2025 simply profitable designer Summit, which is all about creating consistent, recurring revenue in your web design business. It's happening in March of 2025 the 17th through the 21st and it is going to be awesome. So save the dates for that. So our outflow was $17,592

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and that includes salary and payroll taxes for myself and our client success coordinator, Erica Nash, which is about 10,000 total. I'm full time, she's part time. It includes about $1,750

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for all the tools that we use to run the business. About 1000 paid back to my line of credit. That helps, that I use to like help us get through 2023 which was like our worst year ever, and I'll share more about that a little bit later, about 1500 on insurance, bookkeeping and HR fees, random year end expenses, like restocking our stash of wgda swag and mailing supplies for our new Student swag boxes that we send out for 2025

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and the rest of that, about $4,000 is lumped under marketing, but it's our podcast production. It looks like we had two months of our conversion rate optimization service come out in December, which I'll be diving into that a lot more when we get to the year and review part of this income report. I mean, I know I mentioned that expense, quote, unquote expense, that number in my outflow every month, but it is an integral part of my business journey in 2024 and it drives a lot of the things we've experimented with this year, and it is driving a lot of our decision making for 2025 so I'll talk more about that.

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Later. So in December, we added $10,111

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back to our cash reserves. So let's look at our annual numbers next. So in 2024 our total inflow for the entire year was $200,033

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Wait, $233,283.12

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$233,283.12

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our total outflow was $233,244.13

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which means for the year, we added $38.99

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to our cash reserves like talk about breaking even, like that is so fascinating to me, and that is actually a little less than $20,000 in inflow, on average every month, a little less than $20,000 in outflow every month. And remember how I'm always like, our minimum baseline revenue is 15,000 each month. Our minimum baseline revenue is 15,000 that's the amount that I spend each month. That's what I want to bring in each month.

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Well, I get to look at that really closely for 2025 and look at all of the outflow. Because if we're averaging about 20,000 in outflow, and we're bringing 20,000 in, and of course, that's including, like, paying myself, right? The outflow is paying myself a paycheck, like a salary, paying Erica. That's like the bulk of our outflow, but the the other half of that outflow. So the 10,000 is, is me and Erica, you know, making sure we're like, getting paid for our contributions and all of those things. Other 10,000 is just like marketing and operations. Majority of marketing, we are investing in the future of the business and and so I get to look at that really closely for 2025 and look at all the outflow, and ask, How is this thing that I'm spending money on creating more time, capacity, energy or money for us, for me, for the business, for our team, for

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for our students, right? Like, how is it an investment in them and their results? Like, and if it is not, then I get to make a decision about keeping it, if it's not, if I can't see a direct impact on how that's creating better results for our students, better results for us,

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then

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it doesn't get to stay. And also, maybe it's okay to up my outflow number for 2025, you know, you know, instead of thinking about it as like my minimum baseline revenue number anymore, it's like my outflow number for 2025

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maybe that gets to be higher, because creating more capacity for myself to use my time and my brain on different things in 2025

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is what is really going to shift some things for me so that I can increase our inflow and if our outflow stays close to the same cool. But here's the thing, the way I did things in 2024 in my business, what I spent my time on is what created us breaking even.

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So if I want to create more inflow

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than outflow, I have to shift what I spend my time on in the business. It is so crystal clear to me that that's what I get to do in 2025 and that means that I get to make some decisions about how I am allocating my resources, and you know what my outflow is. I could sit here be like I need to pull back and cut costs and shrink that down and get back to 15,000 but I think that mindset of 15,000 and outflow is what created 233

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$233,000

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in inflow. Like, if I want that to grow, I have to be willing to shift how I am investing my time versus my money. So it is fascinating for me to see that we broke even in 2024

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and like I said, Honestly, I think that's all my mindset in 2024 would allow to have happen. And I can see now from this version of me sitting here in February of 2025 when I'm recording this

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and thinking, I see exactly how that happened, like I see exactly how that happened. I see how the changes I'm intentionally making for 2025 in terms of how I'm allocating my time versus my money, will give me the capacity to create more and allow me to receive more and have more flow in and I know more will flow.

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Out too, because I also don't feel like I have to hoard every penny anymore to stay safe, which is a huge shift. I'm totally already seeing the shift from

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like, allowing other people to do things that I have traditionally, like held onto in the business because they're in my zone of

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excellence, as Gay Hendricks would say, but not my zone of genius. So my zone of excellence are things that I'm really, really good at, like building systems and, you know, like pushing all the buttons. But my zone of genius is not those things. My zone of genius is connection.

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You know, meeting, meeting our new students, getting in front of them, talking to them, like teaching, training all of those things, and not building all of the back end systems to support that. And if I'm being really honest, I'm like a b minus student when it comes to building all that stuff, because I'm trying to do all of the things I miss, things I have mistakes, I have workflows that break down. And I'm like, that's cool. Like, I get it. I'm doing a lot of things, and I also want to

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realize that, like, Oh, if I'm doing all the missed things and I'm making mistakes a I think mistakes are okay, but mistakes are a sign that I'm trying to do too much. So that's where I get to shift. And so like I mentioned earlier, 2024 capped off my 10th year in business, and I keep a spreadsheet tracking my inflow and outflow each year in my business. And I as I was preparing this income report. I was looking at those numbers in that spreadsheet, and I'll link that up in the show notes. If you go to if you go to web designer academy.com forward slash, let me pull up this episode number for you. I haven't assigned it yet As of recording this, if you go to web designer academy.com, forward slash,

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1291,

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29, that'll be this episode, and there will be a link to our annual profit tracking spreadsheet, so you can look and see how much money I made and spent every single month in the business, and whether,

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whether the profit was like what I paid myself, or whether my paycheck was like included in the expenses. Because once I switched from a sole proprietor, like from an LLC to S corp,

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the the profit before that, the profit was what I paid myself. After that, the profit was the overflow that I like, the reserves that I left in my business after paying myself, if that makes sense.

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So I was looking at that spreadsheet because I wanted to see how did this year's inflow compare to last year's. And it was so interesting to me to reflect on the numbers for the past 10 years, because I can clearly see how those numbers mirror my thinking at the time. What was going on in my personal life at the time. And there's so much I can learn today from those versions of me back then. And so I was looking at the spreadsheet. And so from 2014 to 2019 I was still doing freelance web design. On the side, I was also teaching entrepreneurs how to DIY their website,

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and I all the, almost all of the money I made on that was from affiliate commissions, from the products and services I recommended. Inside that free training. I also sold a product called site in a snap off the back end of that. So I'm like, I'm like, I'm going to show you how to set this up, and here's some templates so that you don't have to design these, these pages from scratch. So I was selling those templates off the back end, and the affiliate commissions and those that totaled about $5,000 a month. And then I had my web design business, and then I also had this little side passion project that I started in 2016

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where I created, like a course with a weekly live call teaching web designers how to stop under charging, over delivering and overworking. And it eventually became the web designer Academy. And so I did that on the side of my day job for 2014 to the end, like midway through 2014 to the end of 2017 January 2. 2018 was my first day of self employment, and I retired from I retired from one on one web design in 2019 to go all in on like the courses and the training side of my business. So then it became 50% DIY ers entrepreneurs as my customers, and 50% web designers as my customers. And so in 2020,

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the year that the pandemic started, we all know this,

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I launched the web designer Academy. I turned the web designer Academy course.

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Dollars into a full on coaching program, and I launched that in December. So in 2020 the business made $181,000

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I had no employees. My expenses were about 60,000 for the year. I paid myself about $10,000 a month. It was probably 9000

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on average. And I paid taxes on the profit of the business. The business was

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an LLC until 2020 and that really helped me pad our personal savings that year. We built our house that year, and it was at the end of 2020 that I realized I wanted to turn the web designer Academy in course, with that had just a weekly live call into a full on coaching program where we were like giving feedback on people's packages and pricing and just doing a lot more.

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We updated the curriculum. We added a lot of things in that we saw were working from 2016 to 2020 we just reformatted the program, and it was a huge success. I think about $60,000 of the 181,000 I made in 2020. Came in December alone. And it was that year that I was like, okay, yes, this is what I want to be doing. Like I get so much joy helping women web designers, like solve all of the problems that I had experienced and solved in my early days of freelancing. So that was 2020 and that was kind of like the first that was the most money I had made

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in the business, like at that point. And then in 2021

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full on a whole year into the pandemic, the business made $490,000

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so we still had the free five day website challenge. We were making about $5,000 a month in affiliate commissions and template sales off the back of that. And of course, we had a totally captive audience. Everybody was like, shoot, we have to do everything online. So you know that, like exploded, I guess, for lack of a better term, our expenses were $360,000

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and that year I hired two employees. I hired, like a one full time person and a part time person, and I invested a lot of that money into business coaching and other expenses that come with trying to quote, unquote, scale the business. So I was running both the free five day website challenge and the web web designer Academy was in its first year of being that $5,000 coaching program instead of a $2,000 course, and

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the profit that year was 130 through $2,000 I probably like thinking back, I probably took about 30,000 of that in addition to my paycheck as owner draws and left the rest In the business. And I remember my reserves being around $90,000 in that point. So 2021

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being such an incredible year in terms of like captive audience and sales, really positioned us to be able to get through 2023

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right and positions me, us personally, my husband and I personally, to get through 2022 because he his company completely shut down in 2022 and he changed jobs a couple of times before he landed where he's at now. And he had a period of about six months where he wasn't working. And

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so that that 2021 really like, set us up to be able to get through 2022 and 2023 personally and business. And so in 2022

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our inflow was $426,000

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and our expenses were 417

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and looking back at those numbers, I was trying so hard to get to a million, and also I had a huge freak out about being responsible for other people's salaries going on that I did not realize at the time. I look back, and I probably invested close to $150,000

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on coaching programs and ads and ads experts, again, like chasing the scale right, chasing the million dollar

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business, thinking that that I could fast track that like through other people's,

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other people's strategies and ads. And you know, just getting more leads in the door, more leads in the door, more leads in the door. And as we know, that did not work.

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The tides were already turning in 2022 but I didn't see it because I had stopped writing income reports, and so I.

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About this

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in a podcast episode with my friend Alicia Saint Germain that I'll tell you about and in a second. But I'd stopped writing income reports at the end of 2021

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like at that $490,000

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a year, I shut down the podcast where I was doing the income reports. It was called pep talks for side hustlers. I started the profitable web designer podcast

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at the end of 2022 and like September 2022 and I was like, income reports are irrelevant. Why I'm running a coaching a business. Coaching business, my target audience is freelance web designers. We have two totally different business models. It is pointless for me to talk about how much money I'm making and spending

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because we don't we're not running the same kind of business well. So,

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yeah, I really should have continued writing income reports, because I missed so much of the learning and the pausing and the reflecting and all of those things, which leads us to 2023

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where our revenue, our inflow was $178,000

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so 2021, 490,000,

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in inflow. 2022, 420-620-2031,

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78

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and expenses are my outflow in 2023, $306,000

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even after me not paying myself for a few months and laying off an employee. And again, that was me making decisions out of desperation,

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in hindsight, out of desperation to try to save something.

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And so I look back, and I have a lot of compassion for myself. Go with what I was going through, you know, just personally and professionally in 2022 and 2023

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so, you know, in 2023 I dipped into that line of credit that 2022 Shannon was like, just get it revenues like a bank's going to give it to your cash. Cash Position looks good. Just get it, just in case, right? Well, I needed it. I dipped into the line of credit so I could keep my cash handy, and that $90,000 cash reserve that I had sitting there that, like I dipped into that that dwindled down to about 30,000 it sat at about 30,000

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all of 2024

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and listen, I know the global economy was tough in 2023 and I could tell the story that that's why my numbers look the way they did. And that had an impact, sure, but that's not the whole story. I had a lot of mind trash, a lot of anxiety. I was making a lot of decisions to try to,

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you know, just upon reflection, I'm like, okay, 2021 like, I could have, if I could have even just repeated that with what I was doing,

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like, or even, I don't know, like, I just had this, like, need to grow and to create more, more more, more more and grow, grow, grow, instead of just, like, stabilizing and

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I like, it all makes so much sense to me now. It all makes so much sense. I had so much mind trash, so much anxiety, and like I said, I'd stopped writing income reports. I was not looking at any of it, and so I got to really dive deep into how I use income reports to over uncover my own mind trash in Episode 39 of my friend Alicia Saint Germain, conscious edge podcast. The title of it is how business coach Shannon Mattern tracks money to monitor mine, trash. I talk about what happened in my business in detail when I stopped writing income reports for a year. So you can go listen to that at conscious edge.com. Forward slash, EP 039, I've linked that up in the show notes. I recently listened to it just to remind myself of what I said and let the lessons really sink in, and I will never not write income reports again, like even a couple months ago, I might have looked at like these numbers for the past 10 years, especially like the first half of 2020 and been like so ashamed of myself for some of the decisions, or berating myself for spending so much in certain areas or just not noticing problems earlier. But now I'm looking at that, and I'm like, Wow, look how powerful you are. Look how committed you are. Look how when things got really, really hard, you stayed the course. You didn't quit. You came back stronger and smarter and way more kind to yourself. And.

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I have compassion for the version of me who was like,

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try just searching and and desperately trying to fix something outside of herself, when really I needed to just look at what I was thinking and fix my thoughts and make some different decisions. But I have compassion for that version of me. I can look at the outflow and a lot of those outflow decisions and and realize, Oh, I see what you were thinking there, and that created an unwanted result for you. And I see it. I see it. And so but the other thing that I that I remind myself of, is, like I created all of that money, all of that inflow with just my thoughts and my ideas and my passion and my drive and like desire to help other people get what they really want. And I think, look at everything you've learned in the past 10 years, like to set you up for the next 10 and when I think about the money that flowed out with with a handful of exceptions, I'm like, regardless of what problem you thought you were trying to solve versus what the real problem was at the time that you were unaware of because you weren't looking at things and You weren't managing your mind, and you had a lot of mind trash that money flowed to people and companies that I admire and respect. I learned something from every single dollar that went out the door, whether it's what I intended to learn or get, or whether it was a lesson I didn't intend to learn, but I needed to learn,

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and I no longer have any self judgment or regret about any of it, like I it almost feels like I am a different person looking at somebody else's numbers, being like, of course, I see why they did that. Of course, that's what happened. Wow. Look at all of the potential here.

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You know, we just need to make sure that they are,

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you know, aware and making decisions from an empowered place.

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But it feels like I've almost as if I've closed an old chapter of my life and my business, and I'm ready to write a new one. So with 2024 not only being a break even year,

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it was also we created nearly $55,000

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more in inflow than in 2023

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um, you know, in 2023 our inflow was 178

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in 2024 inflow was 233 so we're going in the direction that I want to go. And in 2024 we also had $70,000 less in outflow. So we're going in the direction that I wanted to go there as well. And I'm not necessarily so bent on cutting my outflow, as much as I am really strategically making sure that I'm making decisions

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from a place of, how is this outflow going to create more inflow of time, money, capacity, energy, and making sure that I'm not trying to save something and that I'm using what I talked about back in episode 107

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of the profitable web designer podcast about like, making financial decisions with confidence and making sure that they're coming from a really empowered place, instead of a

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hustly saving, trying to save something kind of place. So I just feel like that is such a great place to start 2025 and I'll talk more about what we have planned for 2025 in my January income report, because we have some really, I think, exciting things coming up in 2025

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but let's talk about, I'm going to wrap up with, like my December, 2024,

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Month In Review. So,

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you know, like I mentioned, we made over $27,000 in December, and like we did that, the same way we always do in December, we hosted a live private training the first week of the month. We invite web designers to fill out our application to request an invitation to that training. And then, based on where they're at in their web design business and their goals. I'll either invite them to the training, or I'll say, hey, actually, you're not ready for this training, like you're still trying to learn web design. And you know, once you get that under your belt, then come work with us. But I'm really, I guess I would say, picky about who I invite to our training, because I want to make sure that, like, what where they're at, that we can actually help them, and that's because at the training, I talk about what our strategies are, how they work, I have some of our students come on and talk about their experience in their program, applying our strategies, some of their wins. And then we officially invite everybody who's application.

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We accepted to join our web designer Academy program. They have the chance to ask us all of their questions and then just make the decision if they want to move forward working with us or not. And so that training was called the 2025 profitable web design business roadmap. I actually put an edited version of it on the podcast a few weeks ago. It's called It's episode 125

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if you want to listen to the replay, I cut, I edited out a lot of the parts that were just for accepted applicants. But I wanted you all to know like, what our official like strategy is for the web designer Academy, because we officially added paid discovery, a paid discovery step to our strategy in 2024

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which if, like, you know how I talked about, like, people are uncertain. They want to make sure that it's safe for them. They want to see exactly how it's going to work for them.

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You know, for web designer Academy, your clients want that safety and security too, and that's why we added the paid discovery step to our roadmap, and are teaching our web designers how to do that as part of the sales process.

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So

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I talked about in that training, like, Hey, here's why what you're doing now to sell web design isn't working, is no longer working, is really hard. Here's why you're having trouble charging more for it. It's actually nothing to do with you. It's how you're talking about it, how you're presenting it to clients, and just like what people need to know right now to feel safe moving forward with something as significant as like web design. And if you heard, if you listen to my last income report, my November 2024 income report, you heard me talk about how at our in person retreat for our next level mastermind, I set a goal to ask for help and be willing to accept help,

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and I'll also share more about that journey with you in my January income report, because it's been amazing, but it's been challenging for me.

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But for our December roadmap training, I asked Sarah geo our Sarah g of Sarah designs.com Sarah design, I always get it wrong. It's one or the other. Sarah designer, Sarah designs.com

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to help me translate my script into slides and to update our post training sales emails based on the new profitable web designer roadmap. And so that was amazing. I loved working with her. She took so much off of my plate. It was all going really well. I had all of this space in my schedule to do all of the other things that I do for a live a year on live private training, like there's so many moving pieces, and I was just like blazing through it, because she had taken so much stuff off my plate. The Xana team team was helping as well. And so

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we do the live private training. We

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get, I want to say over 40 applications, if I'm not mistaken, we had one new person join right then and there on the live training. And whenever that happens, I'm like, Yes, I feel so aligned. I've done my job. I listened, I communicated, well. I communicated what we do here, what's possible for you when you come to work with us, and I get so excited about what those people's businesses are going to look like in a year, because I know they're they're like, action takers, and then we had five more students join throughout the week when it was open, and it was so amazing. And it was like, yes, so many of the experiments from this year came together to create this at the end of the year, we onboarded those students. They are amazing. We had a couple of them take advantage of the 30 day trial one in January. One was like, you know, this is amazing. And I have some like, life circumstances that came up and I can't stay and the other one was like, actually, I think I'm a better fit for next level. So I'm going to regroup and come back and do that. And I'm like, I love it when people are not like, this was terrible, and I can't believe I spent my money on it. Like no one ever says that. It's always some extenuating circumstance that would have prevented them from joining in the first place. So I'm like, Cool.

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And so we wrapped up for the year on what probably December 20, I think was our last day in the quote, unquote office. And then for the rest of the year, I had, like tons of ideas for 2025 tons of space on my calendar. And, you know, we celebrated the holidays like I said, we made $27,000 in December, and that was awesome.

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That's what happened in the business. But there's a little more to the story than that. And I mentioned that I would tell you this in my November 2024, income report that my anxiety popped back up again in December. Okay?

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Right? And like it makes no sense, right? Because nothing in December, in the bit like happened that would you know the world was as i The world was right, right? And so right before the training, that first week of December, the anxiety raged back with a vengeance. And so I talked about in my November income report how in 2024

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I'd put intentional work into my inner negative self talk. And as a result, my anxiety had practically disappeared for like, the last six months of 2024 like halfway through 2024 I was like, oh yeah. I realized that, like, this low level anxiety is just always with me. And then it was like, gone. And I was like, what is happening? How is this my life?

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It came raging back in December, and I think a few things were happening there. One, I had space. I was not, like, overworking, because I had outsourced things. I was working like a normal, spacious schedule so I had I wasn't distracting myself and working to prevent the anxiety. That's one thing I think happened. But it was interesting because it was health anxiety, and I've never had health anxiety before. And first note, I'm totally fine. The details of exactly what happened are not important,

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but what's interesting, I've never had health anxiety in my life. I'm married to someone who does I'm so sympathetic. I hate seeing him suffer, but I've never been able to be empathetic, because I haven't experienced it, and then all of a sudden, the first week in December, I'm not worried about my business or the launch not going well, or money, all of those old stories that used to go through my head every time I had a launch, those weren't there. No, my brain's like, well, those topics aren't working for me. To get my cortisol fixed. Let's try this which I'm like, Why? Why? When things are going well, when I have done so much work on shifting my thoughts about money and business and launches in the future and all of that pressure I used to put on myself, and I'm going into a launch in December of 2020, an open enrollment in December of 2024, why would my brain want to flood my body with stress hormones?

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Like it doesn't make sense. I've been feeling so good. Why wouldn't I want to keep feeling good? And then my friend and my mastermind member, Dr Lee Cordell, from the institute to of trauma and psychological safety, she coaches women

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and women entrepreneurs on like creating psychologically safe businesses. Because from her perspective, she thinks that a lot of business practices like come as trauma responses and things like that. She has a fascinating business. She's also been on the podcast, but she said something, I'm in a mastermind with her. We meet every single month in person here in Columbus, Ohio, and sorry about the barking. I'm dog sitting this this week. Um,

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I always say dogs and babies are welcome on our coaching calls. I try not to have them on the podcast, but here we are.

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So she said something. Dr Lee said something in our mastermind group, not to me, but to one of our other members. And I was, like, wrapped listening to this, so one of the other members was like, I'm in a funk. I know what to do to get out of the funk, but I'm just not doing it. And

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so what Dr Lee said, she was like sometimes, in response to stress, our body actually makes its own opioids, called endogenous opioids, to relieve the pain of the stress. And so she was saying to this other member of our mastermind, it makes sense, why? When you're in a funk and you know what to do to get out of the funk, but you can't get yourself to do it. It's because your body wants to continue experiencing the opioids, the endogenous opioids, because, as we all know, opioids are highly addictive. So when you know what to do to get out of a funk and you can't get yourself to do it, it's because you would be interrupting the flow of these brain made opioids, and your body does not want you to do that, because that actually like feels worse.

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And so I need to talk to Dr Lee about this more to make sure I really understand what's going on. But when she said that in the mastermind group, I was like, Oh my gosh, it makes so much sense as to why I'd suddenly have this really intense anxiety when everything is going well,

39:58

and from what I understand.

40:00

From what Dr Lee was saying, and I've heard her say this before in other situations, but it's because I have been feeling so freaking good lately and actively managing my mind that I'm depriving my brain of the endogenous opioids, opioids that it creates in response to a spike in cortisol to numb the pain of the stress. And it wants those right? So it's going to, like, dig deep into my well worn, like, path, neural pathways, and be like, how can we stress her out to get our fix? Let's try. The launch is gonna fail that didn't work. Let's try. She's gonna lose everything that didn't work. Let's try. She's gonna spend money hiring help, and it's not gonna work out, and she's gonna lose everything well that didn't work. Hmm, let's get her to think that that pain she's feeling in her abdomen means she's dying. Oh, and while we're at it, let's also get her to think her dog is dying too, even though the vet told her at the last appointment that the gross they found in her dog's letter are most likely benign, let's get her into her trademark worst case scenario thinking, and that will get us a big old dose of cortisol with a side of endogenous opioids. And bonus, if we can keep her thinking this as long as possible, so that we just keep getting our fix. And

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so my therapist always used to tell me, Shannon, anxiety lies. Just remind yourself, anxiety lies. And I'm like, okay, like that makes sense that anxiety lies, because I hear the stories my brain is telling me and like, they're far fetched, right?

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But if I'm like, now I'm like, if I am understanding what Dr Lee told me, it makes total sense why anxiety would lie. It's like a drug addict, it needs its fix. Like, the anxiety got so bad, the health anxiety got so bad. It got me to, like, go to urgent care and get some tests done to prove to myself that it was fine. But it also had me so scared to even go get the test done to find out bad news, that it was trying to talk me out of even getting tests done. It's like, of course, it doesn't want me to find out that I'm fine. It wants to get its fix, and so once I did that and find out, yeah, I am totally fine, then it's like, but what about Scarlet? She's got some growths in her bladder. Those might be really, really bad, and on and on and on, right? So the next week after I confirm I'm fine, I get to my Columbus mastermind group again, I just dropped Scarlet off at the vet for surgery to remove these gross that they had to be removed, whether they were benign or not, like we had our that was just a train on the tracks.

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And I go to sit down at the table where we're all meeting, and I feel like my ring, my wedding ring. Snag my sleeve on my left hand, and I look down and the diamond is gone from my wedding ring. It had fallen out of the setting. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, my diamond fell out. And Phyllis, my Podcast Producer, who's also in the mastermind with us, is like, Shannon, it's here. I saw it. It caught my eye when you came in. And so we start looking around, and it's on the carpet, and I'm like, that's a good sign. That is a sign that even when bad things happen, it can all turn out okay. And I just noticed a shift in myself right then, I'm like, wow, I have never thought something like that before. Normally I'd be like, Oh, that's a bad sign. Like, that's a bad sign Scarlett's at the vet. Like,

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it's going to be bad news. I was just like, oh my gosh, that is such a good sign. And

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I just felt something shift in me, and like, we all take turns at our mastermind, sharing our wins and our challenge and supporting each other. And I go last, and I'm like, business is fine, like, it's actually great, but then this and this and this and Scarlet, and I'm like, crying my face off. But then I'm like, but I found my ring. Like, I can't believe I found, like, I found the diamond. And Phyllis looked at me, and she was like, hope is okay. Hope is okay. Shannon, hope is okay. And I was just like,

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Scarlet is fine. The growths were benign. I was fine. I got my found the diamond, got my ring repaired. And I'll talk more about this in my January income report. Because Phyllis said to me at our January mastermind meeting, she's like, it's like, you've been carrying around a bucket of doom, like, since 2023 you have been carrying around a bucket of doom. You're probably carrying it around a lot longer than that, but in 2023 you just, like, packed it to the brim and you can set it down now, like, how about carry a bucket of hope and possibility and opportunity instead? And Phyllis actually started a podcast called the daily dose of.

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Hope, which I'll link up in the show notes, but you can just search for daily dose of hope. It's so good. She actually talks about the bucket of doom story

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on the podcast. And I'm like,

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when I said earlier, I feel like I'm closing a chapter and opening up a new one. It's really coming, coming from this place of like I'm feeling whole, I'm feeling worthy, I'm feeling capable and resilient. I don't need to protect myself.

45:28

I

45:30

have so much more insight into a lot of things happening in the business because I'm like, paying attention again. I'm not trying to hustle and scale and save anything. I'm just here like doing the thing I love to do, which is like the mission and the vision, which is coaching the web designers, women web designers, in our programs, and meeting new ones and showing them what's really possible for them, and just knowing why anxiety would lie and understanding physiological, physiologically like, what is happening in my body when I'm like, when it like, does that to me out of nowhere, because I know it will happen again. And I don't need to believe it or get enrolled in the thoughts. I just get to be like, Hey, I know you want your fix. That's interesting. Thanks for trying that angle.

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But

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I'm gonna retrain you not to need

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the to give me pain relief from cortisol. I'm gonna you need that. I don't need that. Like, I'm gonna retrain you to to stop creating these endogenous opioids in response to the cortisol drip that I've been feeding you. Like we don't need the pain relief anymore. There is no pain. Look around, everything's awesome in our life. Yes, there's like challenges in the world right there. You know, there's so many things going on in the world, but I look around and I'm safe, and that's a that's a

47:04

privileged place to be. It's a very privileged place to be, and I don't need to torture myself,

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you know, in in my own brain, and I can understand, I'm like, Oh, it makes sense. It makes sense, why my brain would do this. And so

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when something makes sense to me, that's when I'm just like, okay, I can move forward and like, truly. Like, what do I need pain relief from I wake up every morning, I look at my calendar. I'm like, How is this my life? I love what I do. There is not a single thing I do in this business that I don't love doing, even the hard stuff, even the stuff that I'm like that is in my zone of excellence. I love doing it all. It's hard for me to give it up, because I love doing it. I love our students. I love seeing them through challenges, celebrating their wins. I love seeing them blow their own minds. I love it when they start to believe who they really are and who I saw them to be all along, when I reviewed their application and invited them to join our program. I love seeing the ripple effect, effect it has on them when they start valuing what they do, which leads to like their whole life, which leads to their clients being more committed, and everyone creating more than what they ever thought possible. So when I think about what I'll be doing in five years or 10 years, it'll still, for sure, be some flavor of this. But my vision is just getting bigger, but at the same time, I'm super patient for it to play out. And I think that's the biggest difference between like now and what I was trying to do in 2022 and 2023 which is to just, like, supercharge it like I'm patient for it to play out. It feels different, and it almost feels like it's inevitable to happen, because I'm not trying to force it so hard. So that's it. That is a wrap on December, a wrap on 2024

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a wrap on my first decade in business, and I have so many fun and exciting things planned for you in 2025 I can't even wait to tell you about them and show them to you. And I'll kind of kick that off in my January 2025 income report coming up here in a few episodes. So thank you so so much for listening. If you love the show. If you've been listening a long time and you haven't left us a rating and review, I would so, so appreciate it. You can just go to web designer academy.com, forward slash review. It'll take you to leave a review on Apple podcast. If you listen on Spotify, you can drop a review right there from the Spotify podcast app. And if you know any other web designers who need to hear this stuff, please just share the podcast with them. Be like, Hey, I listen to this podcast. I thought you might like it. Send it their way. Sharing the podcast would mean the world to me. So if you can think of one person who needs to hear this, I would be ever so grateful if you.

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Could share that leave us a rating and review, and that's all I got for you this week. I'll see you next week. Bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai