Podcast #9 Are You Disruptive?

Why is disruption necessary for change?

I recently read a book called The Disruptive Mindset by Charlene Li. I feel like I found my disruptive soulmate, you guys. This book inspired me to do this podcast episode, and talk about not only the book but also about the reasons why I decided to be disruptive, and the reasons why disruption is necessary for change or for the creation of something new. 

What does it mean to be disruptive for me? 

I was working with a coach in a group setting and a coach and I remember her giving me some pushback on my name. She told me it had a negative connotation and it might be off-putting or offend some people. 

But that’s me! I’m totally disruptive! And I think it shows by me being ok with using that word. In a transformational sense, it means that you’re a cost. Do you want to stop the status quo from happening all the time?

If you check-in with yourself and ask yourself the hard questions, you will be disruptive. Don’t fall into that status quo of a boring-ass life, where you’re not excited to wake up in the morning, and the weekends are never long enough because you’re not excited about your work.

I started my career in high school. I bought into the belief that I had to have a REAL job, with benefits, a steady paycheck, yada yada yada.

It was at a Tony Robins seminar that brought me into looking into what my dream job, dream position, dream career was going to be. As I learned about it I discovered it was pretty Eurocentric. I started asking myself questions about what we were being taught. What you are supposed to believe, or are told as children. 

That’s where my disruptive journey began. And I want you to start questioning things too. Be active but also be conscious of the disruption you want to create for yourself.

Disruption does not cause growth. Growth causes disruption.

I want you to get to the place you desire in your life. You need to use every disruption, like this pandemic to get you there. Use this time to grow! Whether it’s using this time to learn how to communicate and work online, or pivot your business, continue to grow.

In this episode I also talk about I talk about Jeff Bezos, Apple, Facebook, Google, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey. They were a disruption to our world! They did things differently, created things that no one has every done before! 

And something we can learn from them is that being disruptive also means being vulnerable, and telling your story and letting people know what it is about you, that makes you unique.

People will be drawn to you when you step into your greatness and thrive in the disruption.

I’m disrupting my life and I want to empower other women to do the same. Step into who you really, step into your greatness, and people will be drawn to you for you.

I want to leave you with three tips on how to be disruptive:

1. Get to know yourself really, really well.
2. Question everything that is taught to you.
3. Become a forecaster. Think about the things you want for your life, that you love in your life. If it’s not up to your standards or doesn’t exist, go out and create it!

Be sure to comment and let me know how you’re going to do it!

Mia’s Event Saturday, September 12th 10:00am - 2:00pm Eastern Time.

Sign up VIP and get a behind the scenes look as well as a 90-minute session with me! Click here for more details.

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Featured on the show:

Disrupt The Virtual World Experience: Saturday, September 12th 10:00am - 2:00pm Eastern Time.

Sign up VIP and get a behind the scenes look as well as a 90-minute session with me!

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You can view Full Transcript Here:

*Note- The Brand Disruptors Podcast is produced for the ear and made to be heard not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it in print.

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's Mia. Welcome to today's episode of brand disruptors. Today. I'm going to be talking about why I named my program, my podcast, all of those things, brand disruptors, and also talk to you about the disruptive mindset. So excited to jump in today. So make sure that you have your seat belts buckled because this is going to be a bumpy ride. Okay. So the first thing I want to say to you guys is that I have found my disruptive soulmate, so to speak. I found this book called the disruptive mindset by Charlene Lee. And actually it inspired me to come on and kind of talk about book, but also talk about the reasons why I decided to be disruptive, but also the reasons why disruption is necessary for change or for the creation of something new. Right? So I have some notes here and I want to make sure that I cover all my points.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
So if I'm looking down, that's the reason why, so today I'm like disruption, you know, you would think that that's a negative, that has a negative connotation. So I remember when I was working with my coach, we were doing this, it was in a group setting and they kind of gave me a little pushback. She, and the other person that was in the group, she kinda gave me a little pushback about the title. And she was like, I don't know, want to go with disruption because it has this negative connotation and people find it to be off putting, it could be a little offensive. And I was like, okay. So I started thinking about it and I really thought about what it meant to be disruptive for me. And I'm totally disruptive. Right? I'm being disruptive right now by saying I'm okay with that word.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
And I'm okay with the way that, what it means for me. And what it really means is that, you know, in the transformational sense, it means that you're at cost. So if you believe that if you come from a place of total agency over your life, then you want to be disruptive. You want to stop the status quo from happening all of the time. You want to disrupt, and if you check in with yourself and asking the hard questions, we're going to be disruptive. If you're okay with status quo, then you know, that's, that's your choice too. Right? And status quo looks like, you know, that boring ass, like where you're not excited about waking up, you are looking forward to the weekends only to realize that they're not long enough because you don't enjoy the work that you do. That's one part or you're living in some lackluster relationship.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
And you're not even sure how to get out of it because you know, everybody has a bad relationship or, or it could be about money. All of these things are not normal people. That's why they hurt us. That's why we don't like it. That's why it's uncomfortable. But you know, there's a level of uncomfortable where you have to go and do something that's hard, right? There's also that level of uncomfortable where you live a hard life and who wants to do that. So that's the reason why I decided that I'm disrupting my own life. I'm disrupting the status quo and I wanna, you know, empower other women to do the same thing. So one of the things that I started doing was asking myself, do I really believe X? So just a little bit of background about me. I started my career as a, well, actually that's not true.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
I started my career in high school, went to beauty school did not finish. Then I started doing some modeling on the side and because I didn't have the confidence to do these things. I was talking into getting a real job, a real job with benefits, a real job. That's going to give me a steady paycheck, yada, yada, yada. And so I bought into that. I bought it that, that belief, that that's the only way that you can have security, right? So I did that work and while I was good at it, I definitely was not in my zone of genius. And so what I decided to do probably about let's see, 15 years ago, I decided to really look into what it was going to take in order for me to find my dream job or my dream position or my dream career.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
And it was at a Tony Robbins seminar. And I, I don't know how I came up with it, but I looked up this thing called image consulting. And it was the perfect mix of like styling and leadership and the beauty industry. And also like a lot of psychology was involved in, I was like, Oh my God, this is so perfect for me. So I started on the journey, like I did my own work to, you know, go through the image consulting process. And one of the things that I realized was that all of the stuff that I was learning was pretty Eurocentric. And what I mean by that is that it's very colonized. Like the way we get dressed, the way we see people as professionals, it is from a very European standard. And I recall working with someone and they were saying, and we were saying, you know, curly hair is more casual, curly hair.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Isn't very professional. And I was like, Oh really? So I started to question these things and that's what I'm, I'm asking you guys to do. Right? I'm asking you to question all of the things that you believe are all of the things that you were told to believe like money doesn't grow on trees, right. It's literally made out of paper. So money does grow on trees like it really does. Those are the kinds of things that stop us from getting the lives that we want. So I, you to start doing that, like start disrupting everything that you think are all of your beliefs, like start to question them because the status quo wants us to stay small and insignificant because if we take up too much space, then that means that the status quo can't continue to do what they're doing. So if you think that you're made in the image and likeness of your creator, you have no choice, but to be disruptive, do you think that the earth was ready for what was happening when the creator decided to create the earth and create this world that we live in, it was disruptive.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
It was disruptive for all of the animals. It was disruptive for the trees. Like this was all new. So if you believe that, then you have to believe that when you are disruptive, that you're actually getting to the place that you're supposed to be, that you should be, that you're supposed to be at. And I don't like to do sheds and supposed tos, but you're not living at your highest levels. So let's just say that. Right. All right. So let's talk about some disruptive brands, right? Disruptive people, disruptive brands, just so I can talk about how so I can kind of relate it for you, right? So disruptive people are brands. They change systems or ecosystems. Disruption does not cause growth, growth causes disruption. So from a transformational point of view, if you are growing as a person, you're going to be disrupting something.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Because if you're in a certain relationship, if you have certain friends, if you started doing things differently, those people are going to say, Oh, I don't like what you're up to. Like, you're getting to be too much. Or you are enjoying your life too much. And you're starting to make us look bad. I'm gonna need you to settle down. Right. That's disruptive. And when you hear people say things like that to you, or even like, you can even feel it in their energy, right? Those are the things, those are your indications that you are disrupting. So let's kind of look at, let's look at what's happening in the world right now. Right. Let's look at the pendant and how it has had us to be online more. Right? So being online, we're actually learning a new language. A lot of people weren't being, they weren't on these platforms.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
They weren't communicating this way. And then there are some who were doing it the whole time, like kids of a certain age, you know, my niece, we only FaceTime when we talk, we don't talk to each other on the phone. Like we have to FaceTime, we have to see each other. And that's, that was her request. So they're kind of used to the language, but you know, people in the age range of, you know, 35 to 50, 35 and beyond like, this is a new language for us. And we're learning how to connect with people this way. So you want to make sure that you're giving yourself some grace around that, but also this pandemic has been so disrupted that people are upset about being told what to do in order to stay safe. Right. And we're seeing a lot of disruption, but not for the good of humankind.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
And what I want to presence for you today is that when we're talking about the pandemic and we're talking about the disruption that has had on everybody's life, like everybody has been disrupted by the pandemic, but there's also been a whole lot of families, either getting together and becoming a stronger unit, or some people are deciding, you know what, this relationship isn't for me anymore. And because, you know, I'm having to look at my mortality in this pandemic. I am prepared to leave this relationship and do something different or be with, be with myself or to look for something that fulfills me. Right? So that's one of the things I want you to look at. Disruption creates. We're going to have the growth, right? The growth that we're experiencing, the growth that we are engaging in. If we're engaging in that. Cause I know a lot of people have checked out, but if you're engaging in growth right now, this disruption will cause disruption for you.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
But it's also going to get you to the place that you desire to be at in your life. So make sure that you guys are being active, but also being conscious to the disruption. And what do you want to create for yourself? So let's look at this from a business standpoint. And the first example I'm going to talk about is perfect because that's why he's the $200 billion man now, right? Talking about Jeff Bezos. If Jeff did not say to my say to himself, you know what? I want to create this online platform where people can buy whatever they want to buy in an instant and have it delivered to them the next day or the same day. It was groundbreaking. It was disruptive. And while, while it took him a minute to get things off the ground, he's the richest man, single person, individual in the world.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
There's no accident people. It's no accident about people who are, who have a lot of money and the, the disruption factor, right? So him, he's the first person that I can think about Apple, Apple disrupted the telephone and computer industry. Facebook, even if you're not on Facebook or you don't like Facebook, Facebook is, it was revolutionary. It was revolutionary in the way that we were connecting with people. I know there were some other platforms that people were using before, but Facebook was revolutionary and it still is today. Even though there was some, you know, interfere interference with our election here in the U S people still are on Facebook and people still use it to do business. And think about Google, right? We had all of these other search engines. Like I remember when what was it called then? MSN? Was it MSN or Hotmail? Whatever was the first online engine, right when we got the internet, it was AOL. So when AOL first came around, like AOL was the industry standard AOL was what everybody did. It was everybody had an AOL account. And that was what we used for our search engine. Right. That's how we were connected to the internet. And when you think about Google today, like people literally say Google, when they mean I'm going to input something into a search engine and look it up, right. Google is synonymous with

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Search engine.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
How brilliant are they? Right. So that's what I'm talking about. That kind of disruption. And if we thinking about personal brands, like who in the world does not know who Oprah Winfrey is. Some little black woman from Tennessee, this little black girl from Tennessee who decided that she wanted to become a news anchor. So she moved herself to Chicago and struggled, right. But she was like, you know what? I want to do something else. I want to disrupt the status quo. I want to have my own talk show. I want to be the first black woman to have my own talk show and look at where she is today. Always, constantly, constantly disrupting things, Beyonce, another disruptor. Oh my God. I, I believe that when she became her own, when she became a solo artist, that was when she really started to disrupt things. She did not play by anybody's rules.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
She decided that, you know what, I'm going to live my life on my own terms, but also going to do it to help my people. And I love how she and Jay Z have both, you know, really catapulted themselves into this different stratosphere. And even if you think about her whole lemonade album and how she negotiated that term, the terms with HBO, they had never done anything like that. And I remember being at home, watching it with Sanford, my significant other, he was like, did she just break up with her husband on national TV? And I was like, Oh my God, talk about a freaking disruption. Right? She was totally disrupting the status quo. And yes, she, she did that. She did break up with him. And I think the breakup become before she had released lemonade. But the fact that she was like, you know what, I'm not going to hide any more.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
What has been happening in my life because I know other people are going through this. So being disruptive also means being vulnerable and telling your story and letting people know what it is about you. That that makes you unique. So Beyonce, Tyler Perry. Awesome. Awesome, awesome example. This guy was doing plays homeless, doing plays, dressing up as a woman and it made him a fortune. He's a billionaire now like w as the T, as I'm taking a show, he became a billionaire this very week, doing what he only he can do as a child. He said, his mom said that he was funny and that he loved to joke around and entertain people. And that's what he's doing for living. He's in his zone of genius. And now he, he created his own wealth by creating his own studio, his own studio that he uses for his movies and all of the things that he produces.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
And then he can also, you know, rent it out and have other people pay for it. So in order to be somebody who disrupts, you have to be the kind of person that thrives in disruption. Those people thrive in disruption. So that's why they were able to be successful. That's why they are able to make the shifts and have the transformation. So you got to change your status quo thinking you cannot be the kind of person who, who is okay. With status quo. Who's okay with the racist, patriarchy that we deal with in mostly in the whole world. Even some people that you see online in the online space, they don't want to see anything innovative. They're like, Oh, I'm going to go and copy this person. I'm going to go and do it this way. I'm going to hold a challenge. I'm going to I'm going to send out some emails, like whatever it is that everybody else is doing, that's what this person's doing. So you want to make sure, like, it's time for us as start,

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Pause,

Speaker 1 (16:34):
And go with it. Right. I think there's a level of education that we get to have. Right. We get to educate ourselves about the tools, about the things, and then go within to decide what's right for us. I remember when I was in a coaching program, well, in a different coaching program, cause I'm always in a coaching program. That's another thing like I'm always getting coached. And in order to be a disruptor, you should be doing the same thing. But I was in this coaching program and, and everybody would do with the coach. Did without even thinking about it. Like without even thinking about if it's right for them, if it's not right for them. And it occurred to me in the last couple months of my, those coaching program, I'm talking about everybody was doing challenges. And for some reason the challenge didn't sit well with me.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
And I'd love to challenge people. Like I get my clients challenges all the time, but not in this structured kind of, Oh, you know, come to my website or come to my Facebook group, you know, five days in a row, I'm going to teach you something new kind of thing. I like to in the moment when I could feel their hearts and feel what it is that they're struggling with, I like to challenge them on those things. So you can't do that in those, in those preplan settings. So I opted not to do a challenge and I still haven't done one. And I'm not saying that I would never do a challenge, but I feel like we cannot continue to copy other people online or do the things that other people are doing. We have to make things our own and we have to start forecasting.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Like that's what it means to be a disruptor. You have to forecast and think about what it is that you desire. What do you desire to have and go out and create that. I mean, it's exactly what Sarah Blake did Blakely did with Spanx, right? She, they didn't have it on the market. She decided to make it herself. So if you need to know, if you know that you need to begin to market yourself online, or you need to refresh your brand, I have something for you. September 12th, I have created an online virtual experience called disrupt the virtual world. And we're going to be talking about how to do just that. Right? It is one of those things where you say, Oh, you're telling us not to be online so much, but you're going to do this online event. Yes. And it's going to be an event like you've never been to before.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Right. It's going to be the kind of event that you'll be like, Oh, I wish they were all like this because it's going to be interactive. It's going to be fun. And you're going to learn how you want to show up online. Not like not how media tells you to show up online. Right? I'm going to give you the information and then you get to decide what it is that you want to do with it. So go to Mia, Lamott programs, dot com, backslash disrupt dash workshop to join us. Like you can sign up there. The tickets are $99. And if you want to be a VIP and get the behind the scenes, look, and also get a 90 minute session with me. Those are two 49. It's really a no brainer guys. Cause I mean, a 90 minute session with me is typically 1500 bucks.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
So you definitely want to jump in on that. I don't want to leave you with this. I want to leave you with three tips on how to become disruptive, but I want to know how you're going to do it. So please leave me some comments on social media, download this, like it, review it. Give me all the stars, go out and get the disruption mindset by I'm Charlene Lee. I'm going to go ahead and declare that she's going to accept my offer to be interviewed on the podcast. So I can't wait to have her. And here are my three tips from today's episode. Number one, get to know yourself really, really well. Right? Get to know yourself really, really well. Number two, question, everything that is taught to you and not from a, like a bratty kind of standpoint, but from a, do I really believe this standpoint and really be honest with yourself and then finally become a forecaster.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Think the things that you want for your life, think about the things that you love in your life. And if it's not to your standard, or if it's not, if it doesn't even exist, go ahead and create it, go out and create those things for yourself. So it makes sure that you like follow, download the episodes, but also sign up for some of my freebies. They're packed full of information. They're going to give you some of the stuff that some of the tools that you might need in order to start thinking about your brand and also how to be disruptive, right? This is, this is who I am. And now that I'm stepping into this more and more every day, it life has become so much easier. People are drawn to me. People will be drawn to you when you start to step into your greatness.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
So join us at the workshop. The information is going to be in the show notes, but again, Mia, Lamott programs.com backslash disrupt dash workshop. Join us on Saturday, September 12th. I said, yeah, Saturday, September 12th, 10:00 AM. Eastern standard time. We're going to be online for about four hours. So we'll have a nice little lunch break in between, but make sure that you join us. We're going to have some fun. My coaching clients are going to be there and some new people too. So I hope that you're one of them. And I look forward to meeting you then and let me know how much you enjoyed this episode. And what's your, what's your going to disrupt today? Yeah. All right. Have a good one.