While systems are needed to start a business, mindset is the first step in growing it. For business owners, stress and anxieties are parts of the job. But just because they are, doesn’t mean you need to succumb to them and allow them to bring you down. In this episode, Terri Levine interviews mindset coach for business owners, Alexis Fotaras, to share with us how we can work on our mindset and inner game to overcome whatever trials we face in our professional lives. Without leaving the heart part of it all, she also talks about the importance of marrying it with our headspace so we can fully expand and attract all that we desire. Join Alexis and Terri in this conversation as they highlight the importance of mindset, especially towards success.
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Working On Your Mindset To Succeed With Alexis Fotaras
We’re glad that you’re here and we remind you that Heartrepreneur simply means you are doing business with heart. Three special words that we talk about all the time: integrity, transparency and authenticity. It’s the best way I know how to do business. It’s not only helped me create eight multimillion-dollar businesses of my own, but it’s helped me do that for about 6,000 people. If you’re ready, we’re ready to rock it out with you here at Heartrepreneur. My guest is Alexis Jane and she is a mindset coach, specifically, for business owners. Since we have mostly business owners here and since I believe mindset is one of the most important things, I’m excited to dance with her. Welcome to the show, Alexis.
Thank you for having me here. It’s very exciting.
I’m excited to have you. First of all, I’m always curious when I meet someone, how did they get into what they’re doing? What has your path been that led you down this road?
It’s been a bit of a rocky path down this road, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. I got married, had a little baby girl and then two years into the marriage, I wasn’t feeling it. I had depression, anxiety and went on antidepressants. I wasn’t making the best choices in my life. I ended up leaving my husband and on that journey, I went and saw counselors, psychologists, all the things. I didn’t find them helping me move forward. I felt like I was staying stuck within my story and there was nothing propelling me forward. One day, I was at mom’s house and I was sitting on my computer going, “I need something, give me something, find something.” I found life coaching. I was like, “What is this thing called life coaching?” I didn’t even know that it existed.
Down the rabbit hole, I went into going to a personal development two-day program. I ended up in a seven-day program, not long after that. I heard about kinesiology, NLP, hypnosis timeline, the whole thing. I wanted to learn all the things and then ended up life coaching. From life coaching, I found network marketing. I started in network marketing for a little bit and that’s where I got my real passion for business and understanding business better, and then working more with businesswomen who light my soul on fire, watching them go from inconsistent months to having rockstar months consistently and working less and having so much more fun in their life.
First, I want to thank you for being transparent in sharing your journey. Every time I talk to people who get into coaching, it’s like we’ve stumbled upon this magical thing. My story many years ago, I was fed up. I was the president of a national healthcare company. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wasn’t digging up. I went to a conference that was all about improving your life. I felt like that’s what I needed. I’m sitting with someone next to me on the airplane. I’m chatting and go, “What do you do?” This woman goes, “I’m a coach.” I didn’t know anything. I go, “What team? What kind of sport?” She started laughing. She’s like, “I’m a business coach and life coach.” I’m like, “What?”
In that quick 30-minute flight, she described what she did. It spoke to me. I knew I was supposed to do this thing. That evening, I was online at the conference. I enrolled in the coach training program and shortly after that, I left my corporate position to do this. I always find it interesting how it comes to us and appears at this time in our lives. It’s perfect and beautiful. You and I have something very similar in common, which is why I’m excited to have you here on the show. I believe that mindset is the first step in growing a business. Many times, when I have a new client family member, they’re like, “What are the strategies and tactics I need to use to get more clients?”
It's mind-blowing how fast things can shift and change dramatically when you shift your mindset. Click To TweetI’m like, “First we’re going to work on your mindset.” They’re like, “What?” It’s an inner game. I’m a clinical psychologist. I’m also a life coach and a business strategist. We start with the inside. To share a story. I have a new client. She’s a doctor of audiology. Friday was her 14th day with me. Her first week, she got four client family members, but all I did for three days was help her here. I didn’t do anything else, but this and everything changed. She posted in our group that she has nine more patients. That’s eleven patients in two weeks. She started with zero. If you ask me the strategies and tactics, I will say, “That’s not changed as much as this.” Can you speak to that, Alexis?
I’ve signed on a new client and I’ve had two phone calls with her. After the second call, I woke up in the morning because she’s in Canada and I’m in Australia, she’s going, “You won’t believe it. I signed my first client at $4,000.” She’s never done online before. She worked in a dental practice beforehand. Before we jumped on this call, she messaged me and she’s got another strategy call booked in, which no doubt that she will close that sale as well. It’s mind-blowing how fast things can shift and change dramatically while shifting your mindset, but it’s not just the mindset, and this is one thing I love about you. It has all to do with dropping into your heart space, dropping into the heart and feeling, knowing and understanding.
You need the heart and the head to connect with each other for you to be able to fully expand, to be able to attract all that you desire. It’s all about having that clarity as well. If you don’t have clarity, there’s no direction. It doesn’t matter what strategy or what plan you’ve got in place. If you don’t know what you want and you don’t know where you are to start with, to where you’re going, you are throwing spaghetti at a dartboard.
I talk to people whether it’s on LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, whether I’m doing a live or webinars, and they’re commenting. It’s fascinating to me that they talk about tactics. It’s like, “I’m going to start a blog. I have a podcast. I’m going on someone’s webinar.” I’m like, “Why?” They’re like, “What do you mean? I’m going to try and get more prospects.” I’m like, “What is your overall strategy?” They’re like, “I’m going to get more prospects.” I’m like, “No, strategies. The end result you want someone to take.” For our readers, try on the difference between the two. A strategy is the overall objective.
In my business, people go to TLWebinar.com. They watch a webinar. At the end, if they want to grow their business, they raise their hand and say, “Want some help.” We call that reverse marketing and then we help them. We don’t do anything that doesn’t simply drive people to the webinar all day, every day. We use tactics to get people to go to the webinar. I love the dartboard analogy. Tactics to me are throwing darts and go, “Maybe this will stick. That didn’t work. Let me try.” That costs a lot of time, energy and money. Do you agree with what I’m saying or do you have anything to add?
With my business, I’ve done a lot of organic stuff with attracting my clients. When I’m super clear on what it is that I want, I go and literally ask the universe and say, “Who needs my help right now? Guide me and direct me to the right platform,” and start having conversations. I was in a bit of a funk and I was like, “Who can I help? Who do I need to reach out to?” A girlfriend messaged me and we had the most beautiful divine conversation. By the end of it, I was energized. I helped her in her business. She wasn’t helping me shift. It was me helping her shift that helped me shift in my mindset. I was sitting, thinking and being too much up in my head and not in my body. I was feeling exhausted and there was no need for me to feel exhausted. It was just that I was thinking and focusing on the wrong things. As soon as I shifted my focus to what it is that I truly wanted and desired, and what fills my cup up is helping others. It turned up within moments of me thinking, “Can I help?” She sent me a message and said, “Can we have a chat?”
That’s to me is the exact focus that people are missing when you focus on real conversations. We are the same. I will go help someone, family, friends, someone on LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever it might be, just for the sake of helping. That changes my thinking and my feeling. When someone says to you, “This conversation was valuable. It was meaningful,” they might not even say it but I feel that I’m helping someone in the moment for the sake of helping them. No attachment to the outcome, no agenda. That changes everything.
It’s magical. It changes everything. I’ve kicked off a four-week program and I was asking the girls in the program what do they want in my class. I was asking them lots of different questions. One of the questions that I asked them energetically and I got thrown back, “Who said in their head, ‘I can’t do that?’” There were three of them. I said, “Put your hand up.” They’re like, “What?” I couldn’t stop burping because when I’m shifting energy, I start burping, and it was funny. They’re like, “I did.” I’m like, “Let’s shift and clear that now. Let’s understand what it is that’s going on for you.”
We get so programmed and this is one of the biggest things that’s come up from a lot of my clients. I asked the question, their automatic response is, “I don’t know.” They’re in this state of, “If I say the wrong answer, I’m going to get in trouble,” or “If I say what I truly deeply want, I’m going to be judged.” They’re judging themselves and they’re creating that story within themselves. Asking quality conscious questions is something that I found valuable with my clients, and getting them to do a brain dump to get all the noise out of their head, and asking themselves a good conscious question that’s going to help them, whatever part of the day they’re in. I’ll let them do it in the morning, but throughout the day, if they’re having a bit of a funky moment, I get them to focus on the questions that are going to propel them forward.
The quality of the questions and the more quantum questions that we ask, we can change our perspective. We can literally change our thinking. I woke up one day and I had very low energy. Normally, I would bounce out of bed and can’t wait to get the day started. The first thing I did was I sat with my journal and I started asking myself some questions. I got this incredible answer that I was in a routine and I need to change my routine. I did. I normally get up in the morning, I meditate, I do my breathing, and I work out. I have this organized system and I said, “What if I broke the system and I did something different?” I changed it up that day. That was the answer that I got. It was amazing to me. Within 45 minutes, I not only had more energy, I had so much more clarity. It was from taking the time to say, “Terri, stop for a minute, ask yourself some questions and see what the answers are.” When we have a sense of, “I’m open and I’m willing to hear new answers,” we can create more possibilities.
Also, slowing down. When you slow down, you can see more things going on. I thought I’d play with it and my mom and my sisters went for a little drive down the coast. I was feeling a little bit on edge around a few things. I’m like, “Let go and let God.” We’ve heard this a gazillion times. I was like, “Feel more joyful.” I was having this wonderful conversation in my head. The past client reached out and said, “I need to start working with you again.” I said, “I was waiting for that message, but I needed you to figure that out.” It was my energy that I needed to shift as well.
If things aren’t showing up in your world that you wanted to be showing up right now, you need to tap into your energy to find out exactly where it is. One thing that I talked to my clients about is, “You’ve got kinks in the hose. You have to unkink the hose so the water can flow through and that’s how the abundance flows through into their experience and into their world. Whether it’s fun, happiness, love, joyfulness, whatever it is, it doesn’t necessarily always have to be around clients and money. It’s about raising that vibration to attract a new friend into your world that becomes your best friend or partner or whatever that looks like.
I want to make a point for the audience. Sometimes people go, “This talk is so woo-woo.” It’s not. I feel like I’m a very grounded logical person, not just because I’m a clinical psychologist, but truly because I understand mindset and logic, like both hemispheres of the brain. I can tell you that they have to work together. While this may sound a little woo-woo to some people, I want you to understand that it is absolutely true from a psychological point of view that thoughts do create our experience. It’s not woo-woo or Law of Attraction. It’s factually and scientifically true. If you’re in a funk, do you expect people to come along and hire you? I can tell you from 43 years of doing this that the answer to that is definitely, no.
When I’m feeling my best, I’m in the moment, I’m excited about helping other people and making a difference here on the planet, that prospects flow in and keep raising their hands. No matter what you do, whether you’re in your own business, a salesperson, in network marketing, a corporation, everything has to do with what is happening on the inside. Tell us who’s the best client type for you? If people are reading and they’re like, “How do I connect?” Tell them the best way to connect with you please?
When you slow down, you can see more things going on. Click To TweetMy ideal client is someone who’s working in corporate. They’ve got a passion project or a side hustle, whatever they like to call it, or they’re about to leap from corporate into their business and want to go fulltime and be the boss of their life, or be the CEO and take full control of what they want to do in their world. I love working with the heart-centered people and women who are in the health and fitness industry, health coaches. I love working with health coaches. That’s a lot of my clients. I’ve organically started to attract a lot of those into my experience. My background is personal training. I love the health, the gut, the brain and how that all interconnects with themselves. The best way to connect with me is on Facebook, @AlexisJane or on Instagram, @TheAlexisJane_.
It’s interesting because you’re talking about health and fitness. I was looking at what are the different industries that my clients are around. I’ve been at this a long time with over 6,000 clients. We track that I’ve done 444 different industries, which is absurd. I’ve been around a while. I noticed that about 42% of my client, family members are in some form of health and wellness. It could be fitness or dermatologist or chiropractor, naturopath, a healer. That’s fascinating that it is very similar to you because I personally care so much about taking care of my body, the health and wellness, what I eat and drink, and how I move. There’s a natural attraction. Like attracts like. It’s very interesting to me, whenever new clients say to me, “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be working with.” I’m like, “What is it that’s important in your life? That will be important in your client’s lives. That’s a match.” What do you think about that?
When I get my clients to write down who their ideal client is or business partner in whatever industry they’re in, who I’m working with, they’re like, “I don’t know.” I said, “Let me give you a hint. It’s you. You want to work with you. Every attribute that you have, you want to work with you.” One of my favorite exercises that I get my clients to do is write down a huge list of the people that they want to be attracting into their world, and then go through that list and have a look at where they’re not showing up fully as that person. Circle it and start showing up more confident, excited, driven or whatever that looks like or if it’s a leadership they want more of. Where can they start becoming more of a leader within their own life and leading others? Once they started doing that, they’re like, “Seriously, overnight someone’s turn up in my world that I spoke to a year ago and I haven’t even thought about them.” I’m like, “I know. It’s like magic because you’ve tuned into their vibration and they’ve tuned into yours because you’ve risen yours. You’re on the same path again.”
If someone is reading and they’re struggling in their business right now. They don’t have enough ideal prospects showing up or those people aren’t converting and buying from them or they’re only buying if they’re low price, give us one piece of advice that someone can do or someone can implement.
The one advice that I would give is where are you showing up as that? If you’re scared to invest money into a high ticket, that’s where this person is not showing up and wanting to invest into a high ticket. It’s all us and everything inside of us. We always have to look at ourselves first. If things aren’t happening on the external world, we have to figure out what’s going on inside of us for it to not be converting or showing up for us.
The message that we’re putting out for everyone to get is that you do need to work on your mindset and this may be surprising to people. I have a degree in positive psychology and I’m a clinical psychologist, I have five different certifications in life coaching, and I’m a business strategist. All of that is immaterial. Since I’m about 21 and I’m way older than that now, I have someone in my life who plays the role of a life coach or a mindset coach. I have someone now. Why? I’m human like everyone else. While I could be going along in this amazing way, all of a sudden, something happens in life and I’m not quite feeling my ultimate best. It’s very difficult to coach yourself out of that.
I highly endorse and recommend for all human beings on the planet, I think we should start this at a young age, have someone to help with mindset. From what I’ve heard here and I knew way before we started this chat that Alexis is a good person. I knew she was heart-based. I knew she could help you with mindset and she was practical at the same time. Can you tell people again how they can connect with you? I want people to understand mindset is necessary in your life, in your business, in your leadership skills and whatever it is that you’re doing out there in the world. If you’re looking for help, I’m going to endorse Alexis here now.
I think that everyone needs to be working with someone because even when we’re at our best, we still miss things that we’re not doing or showing others. Our coach can help us see and dig deeper within ourselves. The best way to get in contact with me is @AlexisJane on Facebook or on Instagram @TheAlexisJane_.
You have been an absolute delight. You’ve given so much value. I’m glad that you and I are connected now. I want to thank you for taking some time to be here with us.
Thanks for having me. It’s been super fun.
It has been fun. For the audience, we hope it’s been fun for you too. I want you to ask yourself, “What am I going to apply?” Otherwise, you’ve had some more shelf help. That’s like when you go to a seminar or workshop virtually or in person, you get some information. You go, “It was awesome.” You put it on the shelf and you do nothing with that. We’re here to help you transform and to change your business and change your life. The biggest takeaway from this episode is it’s an inner game. It’s a mindset and it literally makes all the difference.
I’m going to tell one personal story around mindset. A few months ago, I don’t know why all of a sudden, I could not stop eating. I was eating healthy food, but I was definitely overeating way more than I normally eat. I waited about a month to get on a scale because I know the scale is going up. I get on this scale and I was 5 pounds heavier than my ideal weight. For about three days, I did nothing about it. I was very conscious of it. It kept buzzing in the background. All of a sudden, I sat down and I wrote some questions. I thought about the answers and I got the answer. I made a quick decision to change my mindset, not to change my eating.
For the last nine days, changing my mindset, not only did I get the weight off, but I made an internal change. I don’t have to sit going, “What am I eating? Why am I eating so much?” It’s mindset and I’ll share my tip with you. Right before I eat something, I say to myself, “Be mindful of what you’re eating.” As I’m eating and if I’m not enjoying it, I stop. If I want a little bit more, I allow myself. It’s a pretty simple, easy thing to do. How can you translate that in your business and your life? That’s a tip that I want to leave you with.
Finally, for our readers and for Alexis, if you haven’t yet joined our Facebook group at Heartrepreneurs With Terri Levine, I invite you to do so. Heartrepreneurs are in there doing business together every single day. We’d love to have your voice and your contribution. Thanks again for tuning in. If you happen to be watching us on iTunes, we love your five stars. We love your reviews and if you’re not watching it there, please feel free to share the show. Our entire job here is to help others. Bye now.
Important Links:
- Alexis Jane
- TLWebinar.com
- @AlexisJane – Facebook
- @TheAlexisJane_ – Instagram
- Heartrepreneurs With Terri Levine – Facebook group
- iTunes – Heartrepreneur Radio
About Alexis Fotaras
Alexis Jane helps online influencers go from being exhausted to confident powerful leaders so they can have 6 figure months.
She is a single mother, a business woman, traveled to Tokyo, loves challenging the status quo, and shifting people’s mindset into peak performance.
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