From Waitress to Billionaire, How to Achieve Success by Trusting Your Intuition | Jamie Kern Lima

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with somebody who is going to blow your mind jamie kern lima welcome to the show thank you so much so excited to be here i am super excited to have you on and so i have a very strong agenda after reading your book of the things that i want to get to you've told your story extraordinarily well in terms of the business success and if nowhere else go to women of impact the interview there was smashing you walk people through just the insane success you had going from you know selling out of your living room essentially i know that story very well to building a billion dollar business and exiting and i mean like the dream ceo of l'oreal for three years i mean it's absolute insanity if we can just take a quick second like what's the 60 second synopsis of your business life ah business life uh it's really a journey of well the real business life is starting as a denny's waitress and kind of knowing deep down inside that i wanted to you know get out and see the world meet people with different backgrounds all that like i knew um i knew i wanted to serve more give more all those things i didn't yet know how um and battled with a lot of self-doubt all of that uh eventually i was a journalist and had this moment time where i thought something was a big setback in my life i got a skin condition called rosacea so i'd be anchoring the news live and i would hear while i'm talking live over over television i would hear in my ear from my producer there's something on your face there's something in my face wipe it off wipe it off and you know i developed this this bright red skin condition there was no cure for and long story short i went through a season of worried i'd be fired worried like trying to solve my problem realized that i couldn't find any makeup that worked for it and kind of had this i guess classic entrepreneurial moment of oh if i have this problem there must be so many other people out there that can't find anything else that works for them and had the crazy idea on my honeymoon flight to south africa write the business plan with my husband uh got that credit quit our jobs dove all in uh and uh spent three years hearing no from everyone kind of rejection and and didn't know how we were going to survive got down to under a thousand dollars in our bank account and it all came down three years into the business um i have one big moment on qvc uh where i kind of risked it all went with my gut over what the experts were saying and long story short um we built this this business and what i thought was a setback right was my my skin challenges ended up being a set up for like part of my calling part of what i was supposed to do and over the years we built what's now the largest luxury makeup company in the country so uh in built to over a thousand employees and then in 2016 l'oreal acquired uh the company for 1.2 billion cash and it was really it was uh i'm making it sound easy it was literally the hardest decade of my life 100 hour weeks made so many mistakes um and you know i think that what the last thing i'll say uh is that you know when i read the headlines about my story online it's like oh denny's waitress 2 billion entrepreneur and the reason i wrote this book is because i realized like oh if we don't share the real story behind the story like all the mistakes and all the the the setbacks and the rejection and if we don't ever share that then people going through it on in their own space they feel like they're alone and they see everyone else's highlight reel and so this whole book is like what really happened the stories behind the stories and then and then just how i got through them and and my hope is that for you know for everyone in your in your community that i'm so grateful just to share this this time and the space with that you know i think it's a common thread through humanity for all of us in our own journey uh in business or in life that we kind of go on this journey from uh not believing in ourselves and then hopefully learning how um and that's really what this book is all about is how i went from not believing myself to believing um doubting i was enough to knowing i'm enough and the stuff i did wrong and right and yeah thank you thank you i'm so honored you read it too by the way i know how smart you are so i'm a little scared of your question that is hilarious on two levels so one i certainly do not identify as somebody who is known for his intelligence but two your book was your book is amazing people should read it and they should read it for the following very specific reasons so people know that i'm not just bsing you're going way out of your way to show what it means to really build a business and transcend where you are and so i'm obsessed with an idea that now reading your book i realize you're obsessed with as well we use slightly different wording for it what i say is it doesn't matter who you are it only matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there and that was a theme that runs through your book and where i want to start and we are definitely going to cover the hard stuff so people are not going to walk away from this interview thinking that what you did was easy i want to start with a quote from the book that i thought was so powerful and this really defines the way you talked about my community this defines what i want my community to think of in life like this is sort of that guiding principle and this is directly from you when something hard happens once you're able to process it emotionally you're left with choices do you victim up or do you warrior up do you give up or do you level up the up is up to you i have the chills that's so crazy i love that so now when you put it back in context of what you go through in the book from just like you know not coming from means and you know one point you can't even afford your car and you're having to borrow car from family members and being on air and having people tell you you know hey there's something wrong with your face in your business people telling you i don't think people are gonna buy makeup from somebody that looks like you um i'm just the bullying behind the scene which was crazy so all of those stories you detail in the book like a thousand different points where i promise you 99.99999 percent of the world stop and you have a jay-z quote in the book and you say jay-z says the genius thing we did was never give up and that feels like the genius move that you played as well talk to me about the idea of who we can become what is it you want us to believe yeah my biggest hope prayer intention is that each person closes this book and is better able to hear their own gut and trust themselves and what i mean by that is you know i think sometimes i think what jay-z said is is so right right but i also think it's not a victory because we're told so many times keep going don't give up don't give up like since the time we're little kids we watch you know even if we don't play sports we watch movies and kids are taught just don't quit don't give up i actually think it's a failure if we don't ever learn how to tune in and hear our own cat and our truth and our calling and then we just keep going and don't give up anyway and we're not on the right path and what i mean by that is you know i since the time i was a little girl i'd watch oprah in my living room and i i just had this this knowing oh i want to interview other people like my whole in my whole instincts tom are i literally just want to ask you questions right now about you and lisa who i'm obsessed with and like that's my my who i am right i love other people's stories and so i knew that's what i always wanted to do for my career so you know eventually um that's what i did i was working as a journalist i was working as a television news anchor and when i got that problem and i mentioned earlier that skin problem you know i was at this moment in time and i think you know hopefully everyone in impact their community like wherever you're at in life right now at this very moment i believe everyone has a knowing inside of them i don't think it matters if they have a faith or no faith i don't think about any of that i think everyone universally has a knowing or a truth inside and i think most people never learn how to get still and hear it and most people if they do get still and hear it they're going to know right now live while they're listening to your knee are they in the right job they're supposed to be in or is there is are they are they playing it small are they in the right relationship or are they in it and dimming their own light because of fear that maybe they'll be alone we all have a knowing right and you know what i'll say about the idea of giving up leveling up all of that i think it's so important that um you know in that moment where i had the and again let me just say there's so much i did wrong and i share all that stuff too one of the things i did right was when i had this this gut feeling as i'm sitting there with this skin problem this gut feeling oh you're supposed to figure out how to how to create a beauty company even though i knew nobody in the beauty industry had no connections had very little money because television news does not pay very well um i had that knowing right and yet i was sitting there in my dream job like that was my dream job since the time i was a little kid so i think sometimes like knowing when to let go of a dream knowing when to quit is actually a victory too it's actually as important as when to keep going right and so with jay-z's quote the genius thing we did was we didn't give up i i think that applies only if someone hears their truth and says all right i have this knowing i'm supposed to be doing what i'm doing and when i look back at this journey of three years of constant rejection down to under a thousand dollars in a bank account literally getting knocked down over and over from all of these beauty retailers that i put on a pedestal and i couldn't understand why they were telling me i wasn't the right fit for them every time i would check in with my gut right and maybe so many people out there can relate to this because you you feel like you're doing something you're supposed to be doing but like for me there was no proof around me that my idea was right there was no traction in my business there was nobody saying yeah that's a great idea let me buy your product and then i'm going to the beauty retailers and they didn't believe in the brand and everything around me was saying you're wrong and the easiest thing in life is to confuse that with the truth and i think the only way we know the truth in life is when we get good at getting still and hearing that inner knowing and so for me every time i would get knocked down i would just check in get still and it's hard sometimes because a lot of people out there they have not heard their own gut in a long time right because we have like our friends and family that are are worried about us if we're or they're seeing everything through the lens of their own life and their own fear and their own experience you know experience or lack of experience and then we have you know in my case experts who i valued so much saying like ah you know you're not the right fit you're not you know not literally saying no and as as you know as i shared in so many stories in the book they said so many other crazier things that all but basically said like it's not just a no now it's a no forever right um but i think the victory is learning to get still and hearing your knowing and then trusting it a lot of people don't trust themselves and and i think that is what keeps people inside their comfort zone in life which i think when you stay in your comfort zone it comes it chips away at your soul and you end up talking yourself out of your own truth and then never becoming the person you're born to be not to get all dramatic on impact theory but that to me is the biggest and listen to me it's not about the outcome oh he here's how to create a billion dollar company it's about the journey of are you stepping into all of who you are and the person you're born to be and how do you do that all right that was amazing but now are you ready to get into the weeds on this idea let's do it in your book you talk about developing your intuition how do people develop their intuition so that when they need to turn to it and they learn to be still and listen to it that it actually gives them good advice yeah the very first step is to pay attention right which it's listen we are so busy in our lives right now and so many of us with all the stuff going on with with the pandemic with this with that with our job with and then frankly at the end of some days all i want to do is scroll instagram or like yesterday eat candy hearts for valentine's day like you know what i'm saying i don't want to like actually put in the work but i believe that it's so important like if someone's gonna do anything and you hear so much about morning routine or this or that or whatever taking five minutes a day and just starting building that muscle and at first it may make no sense right especially because so many people are out of practice but literally getting still even if you have to just go sit in a closet leave your phone out just go sit in the closet and just see what you think and and you know and and can you hear your own truth and another thing i would say just as a real fundamental level is to look back at your past because i believe it's something we build over time if we pay attention right and i can say that most of my mistakes i've made when i look back is because i didn't trust my own gut and i trusted my mind instead and my mind was able to say oh these are all the experts they're experts for a reason uh they're touted visionaries and they're telling you to change this about your product packaging or they're telling you to do this about and they have a proven track record and you don't so even though jamie you have some gut feeling like go you know my mind won and when when that's happened those are some of my biggest mistakes and i think looking back on that's important just to like break it down at a real fundamental level so many of us have dated the person we know is not right for us you know what i mean but we know right and i can think of times where i was dating a guy who i was so into and like his phone broke and he disappeared and i knew he's lying i knew it but i didn't want to know it i didn't want to know it right so what what happens i'm like oh well it's only the first time it's ever happened maybe he's telling the truth maybe all the things right i know he's sketchy i know he's lying right but we sometimes we know and this is such a basic example and we just choose to not to to to talk ourselves out of it anyway right and i think that every human being can really actually just put in a little time thinking about different moments in their life and actually start to remember like did i have a gut feeling about this at the time or did i not or you know did was there a time i listened to that inner knowing and i was right right and we start thinking about those times and it starts to build up our own trust in ourselves over time and for me this was a this was a huge way that i was able to keep going i am you you mentioned one thing that that i mean i i remember and tom after you know this we were a couple years into our business and uh i had been sending our product out to all the retailers and saying hey i want to show models that actually have skin challenges like i do and that had never been done before right and i wanted to do all these things and they were all telling me no and it's not the right fit and i knew my product was really good um i learned the lesson the hard lesson a lot of entrepreneurs learn that you can have a great product or a great course or a great service for a great but that's not enough but people have to know it exists right and when you have no money and no ad budget that's really hard and this is 2008 2009 uh 2010 youtube wasn't huge yet so no one had gone out there and said oh instead of overly photoshopped perfect skin models let's show real people with real skin challenges and all ages and sizes and skin tones and that's what i had this vision for because that's what i was you know and and we created a product that was so good and then after all these rejections from all the department stores all the beauty stores saying no thank you it's a pass your product will never sell those kind of images don't work i had one store tell me women will only buy from an aspirational image of beauty they'll never be able to look like if they can actually look that way they won't buy it and it was just like over and over and over rejection um and i'll never forget this one moment just to share as an example because it helped me develop my intuition muscle so strongly but we had gotten an inbound call from a potential investor and uh and they were a really well-known private equity company and they invested in a lot of consumer products in the grocery stores like household names that we buy they loved our product and so we started taking meetings with them and i was so freaking excited because i felt like oh my gosh if they invest in us then maybe they'll use their leverage to get us into these retailers and also i won't go bankrupt and all those things and then there's that and uh and so we did meetings we started the diligence phase we presented product pipelines all that stuff and it got down to the last meeting and my husband and i flew there for the meeting and it was the head guy he was standing about three feet from me and i thought it was gonna be like the best day of my life right and i'll never forget he's three feet away and he says to me i just don't think women well he's the first he said it's a no we're gonna pass on investing in it cosmetics and like i've heard no thousands of times right so i'm like devastated but i'm like okay um can you share why you know because feedback um is usually a gift and uh and he says you want me to be really honest with you and i said yes and he literally was three feet from me and he said i just don't think women will buy makeup from someone who looks like you with your body and your weight and i remember when he said that to me a bunch of things happened the first thing was i i remember feeling like my whole body fled with like a lifetime of body issues body doubt and self-doubt and i felt all that so kind of felt like i staring my own fear straight in the eye talking to him i never felt anger toward him i felt hurt and crushed uh but i also got this feeling i'll never forget this time i'll never forget this rest of my life i got this feeling like literally in my gut like a knowing he's wrong even though i was still doubting myself even though i had dealt with like a lifetime of bodybutt i got this feeling he's wrong and i remember that feeling because i remember then for a few years wondering like am i right or is he right i would still doubt myself right and and i went out in my car and i cried and i had to figure out how do i turn down the volume in my own head and not replay those hurtful words over and over and over but i also remember that feeling i got and and i don't this is a big business thing not to be off topic but like one of the things i did do right was i never took rejection personally in business right i always figured out how to go okay like if this is a game of chess maybe we will partner one day so i'm just going to pretend we are with every retailer and i'm just going to keep sending them product and keep sending them updates and keep telling them i can't wait till i'm in your store no matter how bad that rejection hurt and in his case what i realized also was oh okay the reason i'm creating this company i want to try to shift culture and beauty i want to try to use different images of models and he's literally passing on investing in my company because he is just as much influenced by a lifetime of seeing beauty images too so he believes also whether he realizes it or not you can look a certain way to sell product and the last thing i'll say about that is i do believe in that famous saying that like rejection's god's protection right you could say rejection is the universe's protection i do believe in sayings like that and when you fast forward six years later the day that l'oreal bought at cosmetics uh it was all over the like the wall street journal homepage was everywhere online because they hit their public company so that means for them they decided to release the purchase price everything i got an email from that guy from that investor i got an email that day that said uh congratulations i'm so happy for you i was wrong but the other thing when i talk about like rejection is god's protection i really believe that because even though we don't see it at the time and it doesn't make sense at the time but like i was so desperate tom i would have probably given him the majority of the company for like almost no money and because he didn't believe in us and because so many people rejected us along the way by the time we did sell our business to l'oreal we're still the largest shareholders so it was like there's so many situations like that but anyhow that deep knowing that knowing he's wrong that's an example of okay looking back over time where did i make mistakes and where did i do things right and then we refined that muscle of of learning oh yeah you know learning to trust ourselves there's so much in that that is extraordinary we're now going to test my abilities as an interviewer to see if i can tease out some of the things that you talk about in the book to put a capstone on this idea of training your intuition so i have a deep and abiding fear of being spiritual entertainment people will be moved by you they will be moved by your story but if they're very careful and they pay close attention it will change how they move through the world certainly as a person just pursuing goals but potentially even as somebody who wants to start their own business so now i want to talk more about how i see intuition tell me if you think i go astray if you have an insight maybe that i'm missing this is what i'm taking from your book so obviously if i get something wrong let me know but so when you get to that moment in the book and you talk about hearing that devastating news which for anybody would be ruthlessly difficult for a woman just multiply it by a hundred so the fact that it you know maybe was a a dazing blow but you regain yourself and you get back in the game and i start replaying your story from the beginning things you'd already talked about in the book up until that moment and i realized okay wait she struggled with her weight in school she was sneaking diet shakes and drinking them in the bathroom with other girls who were going through the same thing and that was like the first ding okay other girls that are going through the same thing that's interesting and you know really struggling with your weight and seeing how it affects other people and you know wanting to find ways to connect with them and make them feel better and you develop this ability almost to soothe other people even more effectively than you soothe yourself which being was another okay that's interesting to see sort of what you could give to somebody else and what i want people to understand what i'm building here is the context it is your i talk it about it in terms of context or frame of reference but it's your it's what people would refer to as their gut the thing that sort of escapes logic that's built on everything you've lived up to that point and then there's one thing that when i read in your book i legitimately was by myself and out loud i was like what i had no idea that you found out in your late 20s 27 if i'm not mistaken that you're adopted and that you become obsessed with who am i and the notion of who i am has sort of fallen away into tatters and i was like oh my the chill i wish you could see that on camera i have the [ __ ] chills thinking about how your story all of those elements because you had the ability to contextualize it see it as intuition god speaking to you however you translate that but that that quest of identity of realizing that what your mission is in it comics was to help people love themselves as they were and so it would be an affront to your very reason for existing to take that guy's advice so it's like if i'm a screenwriter leading up to that moment for the character to be true to herself of course she has to reject that advice because the being in the bathroom and sharing those shakes and loving those women those girls for who they were and seeing something they couldn't see in themselves and battling with your own weight and then the adoption and having to re-figure out who you are all of a sudden you realize yo identity is like extraordinarily important and now the peace the resistance you marry that with a real business education not only of experience but actually having gone to school and studied this stuff and now it's like okay i've got pieces that i can explain which by the way i'm literally just walking people through what's in the book which is why this book is so powerful of when you understand that your life has been hard everybody's i'm talking to everybody now your life has been hard it's full of upsets and slights and abuses and dumb mistakes and embarrassments and all that what your book and your ideas teach people is how to turn that into feeling that when you're still you can interpret through a mission to make choices that are counterintuitive now why is that important your life is an explanation of one very simple idea which is if you want to succeed big in business you must bet against the consensus and be right for you to have built something that you could exit for 1.2 billion dollars everyone had to be against you otherwise they would already be doing it it had to be the counter-intuitive idea and seeing the pieces like that led up to that moment is breathtaking in your ability to lay it out and like draw those pieces together and so what i hope people don't lose because here is and we may see this differently but when i i am compelled by one simple fact right now your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success that is true because the context of your youth binds into your mind in a way that is ruthlessly difficult to recognize as a construct you simply mistake it for truth and so people get trapped in these very terrifying ways so i think a lot about how do you get people to train their intuition so that really when they turn inward because most people i think they turn inward and they're still so broken they think i'm not worthy and so when this guy says don't do this they crumble because they haven't translated the hard experiences into a mission which is what you did [Music] so good i can't like seriously by the way i've never heard and anyone put it together like that and such a through line and i think that it's so true and i just want to call out one thing that you said too every single person listening right now it is so easy for us to see our our setbacks and our hard times and our things where we feel like we're not enough or we didn't go to the right you know the job or the right we don't come with my family or we don't come from the right zip code or any of those things it's so easy like to think that okay so here's what i'm destined to do and and again it's wild the power of because i believe everyone has a calling i believe everyone has more than one purpose in their life um and i feel like the things we go through and by the way let me just be real honest with you want to be really honest i didn't even connect the dots until just now with you about the diet shake i've never shared the stories i share in this book i've been like 95 of them i've never shared with anyone ever right my family's gonna be like you're drinking diet shakes in a bathroom in school right so this is like a lot of like it feels so vulnerable but until you just said this right now tom i didn't even put the dots together of that when i was sitting there drinking diet shakes in the bathroom it's because i didn't feel like i was enough and i felt like oh if i can just be this size i'll be happy or i'll be loved right those are the things that we don't even realize we're thinking in those moments but those things we go through whatever whatever those hard times are in different forms right it's like oh wow they actually if we do pay attention they can become our message our mission our super power right but i'm putting two two together live with you right now and i do a lot of this in the book but never on that one never on that one moment and i just want to share it in case someone else out there needs to hear this right now that it if we really pay attention to everything we've gone through and it's it's it sets us up for for what we're called to do even when we think it's stuff we're embarrassed about or want to hide or we're ashamed of or we're ashamed that something happened in our family or that we made a big mistake in our lives or had a big misjudgment those things can truly if we pay attention to them not only help us refine our intuition but literally turn into our super power right and when i think about the journey because the beauty industry is crowded there's a million brands and when i entered that space it was impossible to get department store floor space because it was dominated by all the big companies and you know it's like sometimes we have an idea or a dream and it's very easy just for that simple fact of saying oh it's been done before there's a million other people doing it before and hearing you talk live now too one of the things i'm reminded of is every single person in your whole audience in in the world frankly nobody can do it the way you're gonna do it if you live your truth and when i think about the decisions along the way of when all the department stores told me no when everyone said you're not the right fit you're not this you're not that i'm also realizing live with you right now that you're right in the bathroom i've never had this conversation with anyone by the way in the bathroom drinking those diet shakes i understood at a deep level of pain the idea of not enoughness i also understood the power of community of understanding and seeing the light in other women in that case it was girls we were young seeing the light and the beauty in other girls when they're not seeing themselves but still not seeing it myself and having that understanding right and that through line then all the way through the investor telling me you know women i don't believe we're gonna buy makeup or something looks like your body in your weight it's like going all the way through that by that point when he told me that i had a lot more life experience i made a lot more mistakes and i could actually hear my own gut tell me he's wrong and i made the decision to trust myself right so you know it would be a lot longer before we finally got a shot on qvc and a lot more no's after that investor still and it's hard in life when nothing around us tells us we're right you know it's hard to then listen to that gut and keep going but for me it's everything it's everything and and and to use your wife lisa's example you know i think we all have it but maybe it's a super power to actually learn to hear it and to trust it and to trust ourselves you know for me it's life's greatest journey for me it's how we all step into the person we're born to be versus talk ourselves out of ever becoming that person yes i am obsessed with an idea that you have in the book about how um all the hard things are going to you know like we started with that quote they're either going to break you or they're going to make you and really that's up to you and the stories you share in the book are really they draw you in with their they are both entertaining because they're well written and well told they're gut-wrenching at times because i can imagine what it would be like to go through that but they act ultimately as a yellow brick road in a way that i found very enticing in your book and one of the bricks on the yellow brick road was that your father was an alcoholic and you said something in the book that i was really impacted by given my wife lisa and what she's like um you said you know my dad loved me and he was a kind and gentle man who quietly struggled with alcoholism and the way that you described that was very generous and you said but there were times you would sit and stare at the clock and because you had to wait for him to wake up which your mom would be off working and so sometimes it could be hours of waiting for him to wake up and he would wake up or he you would get to the time where you were allowed to wake him up and then he would ask you for an hour or two and then i just imagine you're sitting there watching the clock flip until he finally gets up and you guys can hang out and in that you said my dad inadvertently taught me that women are superheroes that have to be stronger than men because that's what my mom was a superhero who's essentially doing everything by herself and i was like i know that it is jamie i don't wish difficulties on anybody but man when they're looked at from the right lens they make pretty extraordinary people so that's a story you tell early in the book the yellow brick road then leads to a photo of you and seven of your friends so you and six other people and you break down every one of you guys has overcome it's almost absurd the fact that out of seven two of you were adopted there's breast cancer there's learning difficulty i mean it was crazy and yet each and every one of them is absurdly successful how do people harness difficulties like that to become something powerful instead of you know leaning into the the victim side which anybody would understand people pulling the victim card from that but how do you pull something else the very first and most important thing on how is you have to want to and i think that every human being can can easily go into victim mentality on a lot of things that have happened in all of our lives right and it's a mentality that actually can i think reward you in a lot of ways and also um become a justification too for for staying inside your comfort zone when it comes to things like going after your dreams and it makes sense for a lot of people right and again i think there's a time i mean i'm not going to speak to people that you know i'm not going to speak to a lot of the really hard things that require a lifetime of work to figure out um what i will say is therapy is the best thing i've ever done in really understanding this and i actually talk about that is it does it allow you to re-contextualize is that the idea yeah and to understand it at a deep level and by the way your show like this conversation to me these are the things that are so important that we invest in ourselves in and do right because i mean i don't want to stay in a place where it could be easily this easy to stay at in my life i think that the quote you started out with like you know when these tough times happen you know do you warrior up or do you victim up do you level up or do you give up right the up is up to you and i do believe why i share the story of my seven closest friends um is because i think this is important i think a lot of people out there are like me and maybe have loving family loving friends but if you were to turn the volume up on all of them and they were to be your only inner circle um it'd be really easy for self-doubt to take over it'd be really easy to dim your own light and i talked about my journey of sort of how i chose my circle around me um and it's never based on a commonality of life experience it's my closest friends and i think this is important for everyone listening because a lot of people are like oh you know i don't have an inner circle that empowers me how do i find one you know i would say impact theory and impact your university that that alone can be a part of your inner circle that's a voice and conversations and information that you want to turn the volume up on and i talk about this because i think this is universal for everyone and so important to do this a lot of times people build their circle of friends based on who they went to school with or you know things they have in common and all the stuff right maybe it's a group of people from work because you're around them all the time whatever it is and i think that that's not always the right thing i think who your circle is is so important and for me um i go deep on this in the book and talk about each one of their stories because i want to drive the point home that who you do surround yourself with and when you judge them by their heart and how they pour into you and champion you and don't tell you this crap you just because you want to hear it they tell you the real truth which is so important um they don't get jealous when you're flying high they want you to fly higher i talk about this this commonality of traits and yet my closest group of friends have literally almost nothing in common you know they their backgrounds are so different they have different faiths and no faith they they one of them was homeless all growing up and lived in the projects and then figured out how to build her own circle and become an entrepreneur and and she figured out how to turn down the volume of negativity and lack of dreaming of all the people around her for the most part that she was raised in and how did she turn that volume up on her own like inner light and i share this common thread um really just to uh inspire a mindset shift sometimes of oh you know what my circle of friends you know each person listening right now my circle of friends they don't need to think like i do or pray like i do or love like i do or anything else but like if i surround myself with people that are truly telling the truth loving me authentically and uplifting and dreaming big with me and calling me out on the bs when i start to like talk myself out of my own truth right which we all do it's a lifelong journey talk about the power of finding people like that and surrounding yourself with them and i think they can be people in real life and i also think that they can be people that you let pour into you who maybe you've never even met um like you like your show for people you know what i mean i think that that's really powerful who we let speak into our lives and who we turn the volume down on but still love anyway is so important because one of our biggest mistakes is turning the volume up on the people just because we love them and they're our family and then all of a sudden that's all all the noise we hear and it impacts our whole life talk to me about the ability to turn the volume up and down that was one of the things i found really extraordinary in your book like if i were gonna do like a spoof of your book it would go something like this somebody was really [ __ ] mean i cried like a [ __ ] and then i walked in the next room like a warrior like it's that over and over like every time well i mean you you actually have a whole chapter in the book about swinging your big balls which we should definitely talk about but first give me the idea how do you turn the volume down when you said that earlier about the guy who said look people aren't going to buy makeup from somebody that looks like you how do we grab the volume knob on something that gnarly yeah i mean it is such a uh disciplined practice it's such a skill it's hard i mean just yesterday i had someone do something that i thought was like a super close friend and i was just blindsided and i felt so betrayed and listen we all go through these things and they're hard um and one of my friends many years ago bob goff is his name he taught me this and it just stuck i just feel like it was so important to talk about it because this tool that baba taught me uh where he talked about your own microphone and then the volume dial and he basically i imagine right because you know but i have this microphone everyone listening right now imagine you have your own microphone and you have to get into really good practice of like who you hand your microphone to and let's speak into it and what i had to learn one example of this is you know my dad who was an alcoholic who was a a good man with a really bad addiction um and loved me the best way he knew how with his own capacity and i remember i was you know working i was always super ambitious i wanted to get a car and go travel all the things so i had four jobs in high school and you know i got i was working uh one of my jobs is working in a um health club and i started as receptionist and then uh they said well if you sell memberships um you'll make commission on those too and i started selling a lot of memberships and i was like this is great and so after high school i didn't go to school right away i moved out got my own apartment i was making like 55 000 a year which was more than my dad at his at his uh job he had been at and uh and i never forget when i made this decision i was gonna go to school i was like okay because i just wanted to get out meet other people and like figure stuff out and i remember when i told him i'm gonna quit my job and i'm gonna go to school and he was mortified he's like what are you doing like do you know how much money you're making right now i mean she was so upset and so worried about me that i was making a huge mistake and so i remember even in that moment you know we all have experiences like that in our lives with our family right they're seeing things through their own lens of experience but whether it's a story like that or it's just a friend that you love hanging out with and you go to the gym with only but anytime you share a hope and dream all of a sudden you feel them lower your vibration like you feel it right because they don't get it or they or they don't like it or they whatever it is bob goff taught me this that basically you learn oh i'm going to take back my microphone from them on those topics right i'm going to talk to them about my workout today or in my dad's case you know what's happening on the news or whatever but i started learning with my own big hopes and dreams i don't give other people my microphone who are then just gonna literally lower my vibration because of their own lens of limitation and it's the skill you develop and when you imagine holding your own microphone listen we all you know if you have if you are blessed to have a family or friends that you love it's not like you know you want to just x them out of your life because they don't understand your hopes and dreams but learning to just not share them all with them hold your own mic talk to them about other things like what's on the bachelor or like what's going on with whatever right and love them but put those boundaries in place and then the other thing is the volume dial and that's big and you know people have said things to us that have hurt us probably universally there's probably not a single person out there that hasn't had someone say something to them that hurts them deeply and it is human nature to relive it over and over and over and over in our own head to the point where we carve a groove and it's like it starts to stick and take root and i think it is so important mentally for me like i'd ha every time that that dude who said no one will buy makeup from you and there are so many other rejections that i talk about in the book um you know when i went to sephora and felt like i didn't belong and i didn't fit in and all those things you know a lot of times the most hurtful words we hear are the ones we say to ourselves the ones we make make up and telling ourselves we're not enough and all that kind of stuff and i have to be mindful and intentional and literally imagine myself when those thoughts come up stopping them turning down the volume and then turning up the volume on something else until i believe it so you use visualization quite a bit um is that intentional because i know that when you had your first big thing on qvc you went a week early sat in the parking lot every day and imagined it going well and i was like whoa she preps like an athlete i did i am you know after three years of rejection and hearing no and that we're not literally literally the words you're not the right fit for qvc are for our customers um when you hear that it's really hard to not believe it you know so i'd heard that for three years and we finally got one shot we finally got a yes we had this 10 minute window and uh to sell our product and anyone who's a business owner out there will kind of understand this that we're only selling two to three orders a day on our website and barely surviving and to take this one shot on air we had to sell over 6 000 units of our product to hit their sales goal yeah and so we had to figure out how to literally get an sba loan borrow money to manufacture it to ship it to them to get this one shot and it was consignment so if it didn't sell we'd have to take it all back and we'd go bankrupt right so you should never say yes to this unless you're totally desperate and you're gonna maybe go out of business anyway which is the case that we were in so you know we said yes we finally got a shot and i felt the weight of the world on my shoulders i flew out and i sat all alone in this rental car uh out front of their building for a week literally imagining uh and i was like and by the way tom at the time i was not trained on how to do this i was like i think olympic athletes they they imagine themselves like landing the triple axel or like you know a standing on the podium i'm like that's what i'm going to do and i sat in that car and i imagined the sold out sign coming up across the screen i imagined you know my message connecting with real women watching at home i imagine all those things but the other big thing is probably like that moment in time for me was one of the biggest life and business lessons i've ever learned like literally learned and fold right in front of my eyes which was you know we had one shot and i we hired um third-party consultants that help a lot of people sell on television and they help a lot of people with their businesses and you know i shared with them okay we have this 10-minute segment i think i want to take my makeup off and just show my bright red rosacea and like prove prove alive how this works and put all models that are different ages and sizes and skin tones and skin problems and they were like mortified they're like okay here's the thing because they wanted us to win right like that's their job they wanted us to succeed and what they all advised was you know if you want your best shot at success here's what you need to do use these this type of model with perfect skin the kind i've seen my whole life on tv you know on television ads and i'm like but that's not why i created this company like that that would be inauthentic to why i'm doing this and uh you know but they're like and we would fight about it and i was like plus like let's just take a big step back this doesn't make sense to me if i'm sitting at home watching and maybe i have hyper pigmentation or i'm 75 years old and i'm like oh is this product for me and i only see one type of model who like with perfect hot with perfect skin how do i know it's going to work for me like this doesn't make sense to me and we would fight about it and they wanted the best thing and that's the other thing i've learned is like sometimes experts i wish i knew this lesson earlier i would have saved myself so many nights crying myself to sleep but sometimes experts that are touted visionaries they would never be able to admit this ever but they still subconsciously can't imagine something succeeding if they haven't already seen it succeed before so it's like anybody doing anything novel or different and by definition if you're doing something authentic even if it's already been done before no one's going to do it like you so you're doing it novel and new it's hard for anyone to imagine it's succeeding so oftentimes when people don't believe in you or don't believe in your dream or don't believe in your idea or your product or your vision is not personal and it's not even often uh uh valuable because they just actually can't imagine it because it hasn't been done before so anyhow they're all telling me to do it a certain way to do to take my one shot in that 10-minute window and do it a certain way and use perfect models of perfect skin and all this so i sat there in that car like literally praying and crying because i also didn't want to go out of business you know what i mean and i was like okay well i just keep having this gut it was like it was like my gut was on you know one hand and this expert's advice were on another and i always were so tempted to put experts on a pedestal too but my gut kept telling me not to do it because it's inauthentic so then i'd have thoughts like okay well maybe i'll try it their way and i'll build success and i won't go bankrupt and then i'll try it my way i had all these thoughts and that's why one of the things i talk about in the book is the idea that like authenticity alone doesn't guarantee success but inauthenticity guarantees failure and i knew that and i just sat there in that car and i imagined who was going to be watching and i imagined like that person sitting at home and i made this decision that i would rather have her whoever she was i'd rather have her look up on her screen and see me taking my makeup off and showing all different types of women and calling them beautiful and meaning it i'd rather have her look up on her screen and feel like she's seen and like she matters and like she's enough even if she buys nothing if she's gonna give me a few seconds of her precious time i'd rather do that than sell a [ __ ] ton of product and stand for nothing and it was that moment where i knew what i had to do but sometimes we know what we have to do and it's really freaking scary and i remember that i got my one shot and i was in the qvc studios and i see the countdown clock and i know we're about to go live with 10 minutes to 100 million homes and uh what i learned also tom was oh you're not guaranteed that 10 minutes like if you go live and you're not hitting the goals like a minute or two minutes in you can get your time cut live and then you're totally you know like oh gosh i'm totally screwed and and um you can't i've also learned this thing you also you can't try to sell because then nothing sells right you can't fake authenticity so it was so much pressure and it was like i knew what i had to do and to how you started this interview is exactly why we succeeded it was like i remember the clock went live and it was you know and i remember it was like 9 59 958 and i was freaking out and my hand was shaking like crazy right and it was like uh but maybe a minute left when the host was it was all of a sudden and i didn't know how it was going but i knew our time didn't get cut yet and um there was about a minute left and the host started saying doing what they call a shade countdown meaning okay we're almost sold out of the deep shade there's 200 left in the day and i'm like and i remember at the 10-minute mark literally the sold-out sign i envisioned so many times comes up across the screen and i just start crying on national television and my husband put a great picture in the book is fantastic you saw the picture right yeah okay so literally in that moment you saw this sold out sign came up and then uh and then my husband came rushing in the double doors he's like we're not going bankrupt like he was that's all he was like so happy about meanwhile i'm like this worked like real women spoken and there's this big thing and that one show turned into five we got welcome back um turned into five that year and then uh we ended up doing over 250 live shows a year for eight years and and right now do and so it cosmetics so we built the largest beauty brand in qvc's history and it is right now at this moment and and i only think that that is important to share because it was three years of them of them saying no you're not the right fit uh and i just think that i don't know i think that anyone going through that right now like no one can tell you you're you're not the right fit you know what i mean i do indeed my dear this was extraordinary where can people catch up with you where can they get more of you oh uh well i am on instagram at jamie curran lima and that's part of the platform i'm on most i am in the dms and all that and um and the book is on believeit.com and there's a bunch of free gifts by the way we're doing a big like launch celebration around watch timing so free lots of free gifts if you order the book anywhere wherever you feel like it it's sold everywhere and then you just go to believe it dot com because the book's name is believe it so believe it dot com and you get a bunch of free gifts to celebrate um for launch week and so yeah this is an honor though an honor to spend time with you i will be amazing this was a lot of fun you were welcome back anytime there are so many things that we didn't get a touch on it'd be fun to do an interview at some point that's just like raw business how to make business decisions that would be a lot of fun i would love that thank you so much for coming on guys if you haven't already be sure to follow her and read the book it will blow your mind it is amazing whether you're into business or not you're going to love it again it's called believe it and speaking of things you should believe if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care