Biz and life update – Part 1

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

I had an AHA the other day. I listened to an episode of a podcast that I used to listen to regularly, and in this podcast she shares quite a bit about her life outside business as well as sharing about her business. And she mentioned someone in the episode that she was dating. So I found myself googling the person that she was dating, and I got inspired by the fact that she’d moved to a new city again.

And I just loved hearing more about what was going on bigger than just her business. And the aha that I had is that I realized the podcast has lost a bit of me lately. The Clare Wood Podcast has been really focused around finance and money, which is great, but I feel like I’ve lost a little bit of sharing more about who I am, and I realize in the day of AI, it’s probably important that we get to experience the human [00:01:00] element again.

You know, if you are looking for a business mentor, you probably wanna get to know a little bit more about me as a person. So on the podcast, I’m of course gonna keep talking about money and finance, but I’m also gonna be injecting a little bit more of the real Clare Wood into the podcast. So what I wanted to do today, and depending how long it go for, this might actually go over two episodes.

I wanted to give you a bit of context, a bit of a life update of me outside of just the business. And of course I’m gonna be talking about it in the context of money as well. So keeping it real, a life update. Let’s dive in.

So firstly, I wanna start with a bit of an update on what’s going on with the business, with Clare Wood, the brand. So my primary focus at the moment is on my mastermind [00:02:00] community, which is called the Profit Collective. So this is a really incredible group. I’m, I’m really, really proud of what we are building here.

It’s a six and multi six figure business owners who have aspirations to grow their business to that million dollar mark, but without the burnout. And we have some really beautiful women in the community. We have the Facebook community where, you know, people can pop in, ask questions, celebrate wins, share their struggles.

And I’m coming back to anything that gets posted in there as our other people in the community. We’ve got our regular calls and we also have in-person retreats here in Australia. If you’re listening from outside Australia, you’re welcome to join even if you are outside Australia. But the retreats are held here.

So at the moment I’m busily planning for our next retreat in November. Our last one was here at the Gold Coast, which is where I’m based, and it was just such a [00:03:00] really beautiful day, like, and, and evening. We also had a dinner after and. I’m not, I don’t wanna spoil what we did, but there were a couple of, yeah, experiences we did.

One of the things we did was an ice bath to really stretch people to have a different experience. We won’t be doing an ice bath at an next retreat, but I do have a couple of little surprises up my sleeves. And really these experiences are about taking our online virtual experience into. Real life because there’s a level of connection that happens when you are together in person, when you can hug, when you can really share that you just can’t emulate online.

So that is why I’m really taking it into this hybrid model where we have these in-person experiences as well. There’s also the VIP upgrade, so a couple of people have opted where they get private coaching calls as well, and the [00:04:00] VIPs also get an extra day. So the retreats for the VIPs are actually two days.

So I’m having a lot of fun planning that at the moment, looking at venues, trying out how to create a really amazing experience for our next retreat in November. I have also recently invested in a coach. So weirdly, I have not had a mentor for a while now, and it’s really unlike me and I’ve been taking a bit of a break to really firstly focus on growing my business, profitability. And secondly, to really be integrating a lot of the things that I just know that I needed to be doing on my own. But I was finding myself getting really stuck and an opportunity popped up for to invest for just one month with a coach who is a friend of mine at Tina Tower. So it was $6,000 for the one [00:05:00] month, and I really just needed this injection into my business.

It was just so transformative. I had so many ahas and the biggest one I had was around my workload. Now as a coach myself. I can see things in other people’s businesses, so clearly. I’m like, you’re working too much. You’re working on the wrong things, you’re not working enough. And with Tina’s fresh eyes on my business, my bigger heart was that actually I’m not working enough. Now, I don’t wanna be glorifying that. You know, you need to be working all the time to build a successful business. Not at all. In fact, I talk a lot about the opposite, but one of the exercises she got me to do was actually time track my week and wow. What a big aha. I realized that I have [00:06:00] been focusing on a lot of things that aren’t the Clare Wood brand, so I’ve been picking up a lot of the heavy lifting with the children, with our household responsibilities, with cleaning.

We haven’t had a cleaner for quite a while, and basically I picked up a lot of that slack. I’ve also been helping my husband a lot more in his business lately. Now I always kind of have been a sounding board for him, but recently I’ve actually taken on, you know, quite a bit like leading some projects for him, really helping him out with hiring, firing, building his team, putting some systems and and structures in place, which is great. And objectively,

this still makes sense for me because at the moment my husband actually is the primary breadwinner in our household, so it makes sense for us as a household for for me to be helping him out there. [00:07:00] However, I hadn’t realized just how much of my work week this had been taking up, so it’s been really fantastic to have the visibility over that and to be able to say, “Hey., The way that I’m doing all of the things is not sustainable.” So off the back of that, I’ve gone and rehired a cleaner again, which feels amazing. I have invested in some extra support with the kids, so really making sure that that’s not all landing on me. We’ve got them in, you know, some after school activities and things like that, and we’ve also bought ourselves a robo vac.

Now I’ve heard a lot of people raving about robo, robo vacs and I never really got it. And now I have to say it has been a game changer for us. In case you’re wondering, we’ve got the Roborock, I dunno what it’s called, [00:08:00] Roborock. My husband did a lot of research and yes, it’s, you know, it’s an investment, but it really has been a game changer for us because, because we have a smaller house.

I vacuum every single night the whole place, or at least I used to. And now the Roborock does that for me. So I wanted to share that. Investing in a coach, big, big decision, and such a fantastic decision. I am hoping to be able to continue on working with her, but in the interim, I am doing it in a profitable way.

I am not someone that just blindly invest in things. I’m gonna run my numbers and I’ve set myself a profit goal, and when I hit it, I’m gonna be hopefully working with her on an ongoing basis. So that’s a little bit of an update on the business. I’m still doing discovery calls for my private coaching, quite a few people interested in investing in mentorship at the moment, and also doing discovery [00:09:00] calls for the profit collective.

So if either of those are of interest, please reach out and we can have a chat about whether these are the right fit for you. The next area I guess, of life that I wanted to give a bit of an update on is health. So I’ve actually recorded a whole podcast episode around this and I never released it. It felt a little bit vulnerable, but I’m gonna touch on it today and I might have to release the, the podcast episode moving forward.

But basically I am going through perimenopause and there’s a lot that’s changing in terms of my life as a result of the bag. Probably the biggest thing that, you know, I’ve had a whole array of symptoms in this area and a lot of it has been able to, like, has smoothed out. And again, I talk about this on the episode, so I’ll share more there.

But one of the big things [00:10:00] that I’ve noticed as a side effect that, that continues to affect me is anxiety. I am someone who has, maybe had a tendency for anxiety, and I definitely think that perimenopause has exasperated it. Exasperated, exasperated it. I dunno what the right word is, but you get my gist.

It’s definitely been making my anxiety worse, so I’m having to do a lot of work on my energy and on the way that I do things. I strongly suspect that I have ADHD. I don’t have an official diagnosis yet. I am working on that behind the scenes, but one of the things that I found that I tend to do is I take on all of the things.

I am one of those people, I overcommit. I wanna help everyone, and I do this both inside and and outside the business. Like a classic example of this is me going, “we don’t need the cleaner anymore. I can clean.” I do this in a lot of different [00:11:00] areas. I am the mom that is always offering to babysit other people’s kids.

I was, you know, the president of a not-for-profit. I’m the person that tends to overcommit. So I’ve been doing a lot of regular therapy, you know, for years now, and one of the areas that we keep focusing on is how can we get me setting better boundaries? If you are like me, it can be really hard to do this because we do have a lot more energy than the average person and so therefore we, we can do more than most people.

But it doesn’t mean that you should, because for me, what tends to happen is that this thing comes at the expense of I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, and then suddenly I’m an anxious mess. So doing a lot of work in that area. Training. I’m also still really passionate about my, about my gym, about lifting weights, [00:12:00] and recently I’ve started to take creatine, so I’ll keep you posted how that goes.

I am finding that it means that I can lift a bit more when it comes to my weights. So, loving that, and I’m still being really, really consistent with my weight training, which again, being in perimenopause or really being in any life stage, but particularly now, lifting weights is meant to be really, really beneficial for you.

The next area that I wanted to share a bit of an update around is our house. So, if you’re new to the podcast, let me share a bit of the backstory. Basically, a couple of years ago, I think it was about five years ago, five years ago, I had a, a crazy dream that I wanted to buy a waterfront home. Now, at the time, this seemed beyond ridiculous because we were struggling to just pay our rent where we were in Brisbane at the time.

But nonetheless, came up with this vision and said, I wanna live by the beach. [00:13:00] We didn’t know where. At the time, we were exploring both the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast here in Australia, and we decided that the Gold Coast was more our vibe. So me and hubby were driving down here. We were manifesting like crazy.

We were walking through open homes, all the things and originally, it still just seemed like, what the hell are you talking about people? And bit by bit, we actually inched closer and closer to making this dream a reality. In the end of 2022, a mortgage broker said to us, guess what? I’ve actually found a way that you can borrow the money.

And it just seemed like the most crazy, surreal thing, but we bought our waterfront home. We’ve got 18 meters of canal frontage at the back of our house. We are literally on the street [00:14:00] that I used to write down again and again as my ideal street. So it’s a dream come true. We can walk to the beach. We walk every day to the beach on our family morning walk.

It’s just so surreal, like even telling you about it nearly four years later. It feels so incredibly surreal that, this has come to fruition. There’s a, but the waterfront home is not exactly the home or the house that we have have dreamed of. It’s a crappy little house that we lovingly call the Beach Shack.

And you know, we, when we first moved here, we put down some new floorboards. We painted it, we made it livable, but we didn’t wanna spend a lot of money on it because the vision is to knock it down and build. A couple of years on, you know, we’ve had a particularly wet winter this year, and you may know a cyclone actually hit here at the Gold Coast a couple of months ago.

Long story short, the house [00:15:00] is desperate for either some love and attention or to be knocked down. We have mold in several places in the house. The floorboards are lifting and we suspect there’s probably mold under the floorboards as well. And if you know anything about mold, it’s not a great thing.

We really need to do something ASAP. So we feel like this has kind of been a, a loving shove in the right direction. And something really incredible has happened in the meantime, which is the housing market has gone up again, which means that a property that we own in Brisbane you know, has gone up quite a lot in value.

And so we finally reached the point where we said, “Hey, let’s sell our unit. And we might actually be able to bloody build the house that we want.” So the house, the, the apartment rather our unit is currently being listed. It’s, it’s, we are hoping to be selling that. [00:16:00] And other behind the scenes, we’ve also made some money on shares and a few other things.

My husband’s business is ticking along, my business is ticking along and it’s looking like we might actually be able to do this. So we signed a contract for, basically this contract just takes it to the next stage. So we are getting a soil test done. We’re getting a survey done and we’ll be able to get a final quote to see whether we can push go on the build.

So we are in just such a state of disbelief but also excitement. And also there’s still gotta be quite a few ducks that have got line up for this to actually happen, but this feels so incredibly close, incredibly surreal. And if you are listening and you have big crazy dreams that feel really, really far away, I wanna let you know to hang onto those dreams because so much of what I’ve been able to create in my life once seemed like a crazy.

Dream and bit by [00:17:00] bit things are happening and I. I just wanna remind you to hold onto your big, big dreams and keep chasing ’em, even if it feels impossible or really far away, or really hard at the moment, because every amazing thing that’s happened in my life has felt really hard at times, really far away, and then all of a sudden all these jigsaw puzzle pieces start to click together and you’re like, oh my gosh, this might actually happened, so hang in there. Alright, I am going to cut this episode because I’m realizing there’s quite a lot to update on. I’m gonna create a part two, which I will talk about next week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little life update. It feels a little bit what’s the right word?

Self-indulgent to be doing a couple of episodes just about what’s going on in my life. But hopefully you find it interesting. I know that I certainly love listening to, you know, what’s going on for people that [00:18:00] I follow online and listen to. So drop me a DM, let me know what you think, and I’ll be back next week for a part two on what’s going on behind the scenes.

If you have wanted to work with me as your mentor for a while and maybe the profit Collective sounds like it might be the right fit for you, maybe you’re keen for a bit of one-on-one coaching. You can book a call with me. There’s a link in the show notes for today’s episode of the podcast. Book a call and we can have a no pressure chat to find out if I am the right coach for you and if this is the right time.

So if you have wanted to come into my world, click on the link in the show notes and find out more. Chat to you next week.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio