406 MINISODE Marisa Murgatroyd: Iterate Your Way To Awesome

Women Innovating Networking Growing Scaling – that’s WINGS … I’m Melinda Wittstock, my mission is to help women take flight to soar to the success of our dreams in business and in life– and create and grow businesses in alignment with our passion and purpose.

On this special Mentoring Minisode of Wings of Inspired Business … we talk about why there’s never a “right time” to take the leap, how entrepreneurs must never wait for something to be perfect or convenient. There are no limits to what is possible so your job as a business leader is to set your limits high (or choose to be limitless) and “iterate your way to awesome”

Here with us today to provide her insights and inspiration is …

Marisa Murgatroyd

Marisa is transforming the way we learn online.

Right now 97% of people who buy online courses never finish them, and that’s why Marisa is on a mission to reinvent online education around the world so results and engagement become the norm and not the exception.

Marisa Murgatroyd is the Founder of Live Your Message and the creator of the Experience Product Masterclass – and she helps entrepreneurs sell more online programs and get better, faster results for their students.

Marisa Murgatroyd will be here with her advice in just a moment on our Mentoring Minisode and first …

And now to the inspiring Marisa Murgatroyd.

Standing at 4’11 and a quarter, she’s called the shortest woman in marketing — and that doesn’t stop her from having huge ideas – and a huge impact.

Dozens of industry leaders have come to learn Marisa’s “experience escalation” methodology for engaging students for measurable outcomes in the past two years including John Assaraf, Bill Baren, Alex Mandossian, Jesse & Sharla, Ocean Robbins, Steve Olsher, Josh Turner and many more.

Marisa also turns everyday entrepreneurs into online superheroes so they can change the world from their living room – by being the most bold, colorful, vibrant expression of who they are online, because that’s the only way to cut through the noise of a billion websites and actually be heard.

She started her career as an artist who was told by her father that she had no marketable skills.

She figured out how to build a multi-seven figure business anyway and showed over 5,000 students how to succeed online—many of whom felt like they had “no marketable skills” or were also told they couldn’t do it.

Marisa Murgatroyd

Marisa Murgatroyd is changing the game of business by helping to reinvent the $100 billion online learning industry around the world so results and engagement become the norm and not the exception. CEO and founder of Live Your Message and the creator of the Experience Product Masterclass, Marisa shares her secrets of innovation and why there’s never a “right time” to take the leap or wait for something to be perfect. Marisa has created three 7-figure-a-year product lines and teaches entrepreneurs how to 10x their engagement and results, which leads to more referrals, more sales and more repeat sales.

Melinda Wittstock:         Marisa welcome to Wings.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:         I’m so excited to talk to you. I love what you do: making sure that people actually get something out of these courses that they sign up, you know that the transformation actually happens. And I’m curious what’s inspiring you right now?

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Well, it really relates to what you just said. I am inspired about reinventing online education around the world so results in engagement become the norm and not the exception in these matters because right now, e-learning and online education is a $200 billion a year industry. And Forbes actually believes it’s going to become a $325 billion industry by the year 2025. So it’s only growing as people turn to the internet to learn how to do things in life and overcome challenges and become the people they want to become. But unfortunately, most people don’t understand how to really deliver on that promise.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, there’s so many courses out there and it’s hard to evaluate whether they’re any good or not or people get into them and then they just never finish, perhaps the psychology of the course isn’t quite right.

Melinda Wittstock:         What an amazing opportunity though with how much that industry is growing, but it can be so frustrating, I think for the consumer trying to figure out which course is actually going to be effective, who to believe, not to believe and how to make sure that it actually delivers results.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Absolutely. And here’s the thing is there’s a difference between being an expert and knowing how to do something for yourself and knowing how to inspire someone else to get the same result in their own life. So I think one of the core differentiators is whether you’re creating a product or you’re looking for a product to buy is how can you shift from being in expert mode to really being in the mode of getting people results and the very specific results. And the biggest mistake people make is trying to train people on a topic or on a subject. But unless you want to become a professional in a topic or a subject, it’s just not the way that adults learn. I mean that’s like going back to elementary school when you’re in math class or you are in social studies or you’re in English literature or whatever it happens to be where you’re just learning about a subject.

But in the real world there’s very little need with that kind of abstract theoretical education and adults need contests. They need to see how this is going to help them right now. And so I recommend both, whether you’re creating a product or you’re looking to learn something, that you seek out something that actually is delivering a specific results. What will doing this allow you to be, feel, have, overcome or achieve? And this is what I call creating mission-based products. And a mission is a very clear concrete goal of what someone’s going to do through your product. And it’s so clear and concrete that you could almost film someone crossing the finish line, the mission accomplished. It’s like a binary. You might’ve achieved it or you haven’t.

And so often people just want to do this transference of information. But the truth is that nobody transforms from information alone. If they did, we’d all be living in Googletopia right now because we’d be rich and happy and hot and having everything we could possibly want because all the information in the world is at our fingertips 24/7 like all of human historical knowledge is at our fingertips. And that’s actually led some more problems, not less. So people need to know how to transform their lives in very, very specific and tangible ways.

Melinda Wittstock:         So true. So everyone in business has ups and downs and challenges along the way. I always like to de-stigmatize these for particularly women who are listening, who compare themselves to others and have a tendency sometimes to think, “Oh my God.” When there’s a failure or something like that and think they’re not enough somehow. What are some of your challenges, Marisa, that you’ve gone through in your business and how have you turned those around? And do you have any right now?

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Oh my God. Well, I can tell you some historical problems and I definitely have problems right now. I basically have problems all the time, but I like to say that but being successful in business is about giving yourself permission to have bigger problems because with greater success comes greater challenges. And a lot of times it’s about building that mental and emotional resilience to roll with the punches and kind of take the challenges and strive and just know it’s part of business, it’s part of life. And if you’re shooting for the moon I mean the number of rockets, that kind of birth concealer that hit the atmosphere before they reach the moon is astounding and you’ve just got to be prepared for that. So earlier on in my career, I remember my husband wanting me to create my first program and I was just shocked. I was like, “What would anyone pay me for? Who is actually going to want to learn from me?” And the fact that I have over 5,000 students now, it’s kind of a miracle because I really didn’t think there was anything that I had to offer that people would pay me for.

And I think it’s so common for women in particular and not to see their gifts. And then when I did finally figure out how it could teach and train something, I remember watching people sometimes stop and not go through the program all the way and not get results and or criticized some aspect of the program. And I’d feel so shattered that I wasn’t really delivering value. And I remember going up to a colleague and asking her, “Is this common for people to buy programs and not finish them because I’d really put my heart and soul into this?” And what she told me next just kind of felt like a gut punch and what she told me is that, “Marisa, maybe some people just aren’t meant to succeed.”

And I was like, “Ouch, I don’t know if I believe that.” Right? I don’t believe that at all. I believe that anyone can succeed with the right conditions and circumstances and that’s kind of what started me on the path to get obsessed with how to get people so excited and addicted to achieving their biggest goals in life and busting through the greatest challenges as addicted to that as they are to playing games or surfing the internet or being on Facebook or Instagram or whatever have you. And realizing that with the right circumstances, with the right conditions, anyone can be successful. But those insights and realizations came out of low points of realizing that I was unintentional leaving people behind.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love what you said because often it’s in the challenges where we find gold. It’s in those moments where our customers tell us something that we maybe don’t want to hear but they improve the product. When we co-create with them and when we have a failure, it’s just feedback suggesting maybe we go in a different way. And as entrepreneurs we have to be constantly learning. So thank you so much for sharing that. So when you look back at this stellar career you’ve had, I mean Marisa, you are the kind of doyenne of e-learning and also engagement around that. What are some of the, I don’t know, your top three best pieces of advice for women at any stage really of the entrepreneurial journey based on some of the things that you’ve experienced?

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Yeah, for sure. That’s a great question. Well, I would say the first piece of advice is to give yourself permission and don’t wait for someone else to tell you it’s your time. Don’t wait for perfection. Don’t wait for the right idea. Don’t wait for the right time. Don’t wait for the stars to align. And so often I always tell people there’s no convenient time to have a baby and there’s also no convenient time to have a business and you are never ever going to have it all figured out before you begin. So you’ve got to be willing to just make the leap and know and trust that you’ll ultimately know what to do. And you’ve got to make some mistakes along the way. I talk about iterating your way to awesome instead of make get started choices rather than forever choices. And then iterate your way to awesome to get out of the stuck cycle and into the iteration cycle.

So in the iteration cycle, you basically have an idea, you take action on that idea that gives you greater clarity, which gives you greater momentum, which leads to better ideas, more action, even more clarity, and over more amendments up, which is very different from the stuck cycle where you have an idea, you proceed to overanalyze it, which has you feeling stuck, which is the total loss of momentum which leads to just going around and around the same circle of the same idea for a very long time. So give yourself permission to just make the leap, make those get started choices, not be perfect, not waiting for perfect conditions, not saying that you need to do this, then this and then this and then this before you get started, just make it happen.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, I love that. That’s so important. I know so many women who do get very trapped in the analysis paralysis, like they’re thinking about step 100 instead of step one.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         So do what’s right in front of you and the rest, yeah, you have to just take that leap of faith. So what would be advice number two?

Marisa Murgatroyd:       So advice number two is there are no limits to what’s possible for you. And as a woman entrepreneur, I feel like it’s easy to stay in a box of, “Okay, I’m going to build a six figure business, I’m going to build a seven figure business.” And then there are these women entrepreneurs who’ve got $100 million businesses. They’re very, very, very rare. I think there’s a handful of them. It’s possible for you if that’s what you want. Now I’m not saying that that needs to be what you want, but it’s possible. And to really come from a place of possibility and ask yourself, “Well, what’s right for me?”

And start to get very let’s see, obsessed about rooting out any limitation that was imposed on you by someone other than your greatest, deepest wisest self. Whether it was your parent, your family, your current partner, your teachers, your education, society itself, whatever limits that you’ve placed on yourself or allowed to be placed on you. Really look at them and ask them, what’s the limit that I agree with that feels right that I want to accept? Or is it something that I can bust beyond and on whatever that state is, that ultimate end goal that you want to achieve, whether it’s that seven figure business, eight figure business, nine figure business, start making action from that place, knowing this that you can be there, you can get there.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love it. We all have these beliefs. Some of them just went into our brain when we were three and we made a story up about it. It doesn’t mean that it’s correct. So what great advice. All right, the final one. Number three.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Yeah. And this is based on a quote by the motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar. And it’s, you can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. And I think it’s so easy to get caught up in your business, your passion, your mission, and when you’re caught up in all that, you’re also caught up in your doubts, in your fears and your insecurity. And when you learn that the mental shift is to focus on how you can serve, how you can help, how your skills can meet the market. All of a sudden you see that what you’re doing is so much bigger than you and so much bigger than your fears and your doubts and your insecurities, and simply by helping other people get what they want in the way that you’re uniquely designed to do, you can also get everything that you want.

Melinda Wittstock:         Wonderful, wonderful advice. So I know that you help people now create these amazing courses as well. And how can people find you, work with you? And of course you have a wonderful freebie that you’re offering everybody and I want to give you a chance to tell everybody about it.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Yeah, thank you. Well, I’ve put together a checklist of 10 essential experiences really to create addictive viral products, programs, courses, you name it. It’s going to get people hooked on transforming their lives through you and through your work and ultimately lead to more sales, more repeat sales, more referrals, and a lot less refunds. You’ll start to have a lot more fun delivering your products. So the 10 things you should do and the 10 things you shouldn’t do. And on that list are things like mission, what I just shared with you. So things like constant wins, normalizing challenges and other things like that that are not necessarily obvious things. They’re just ways to kind of structure and design your programs. So they become super sticky and they get people as excited to just lunch towards their hopes and dreams and goals and overcome the greatest challenges.

But when you do that, your business really will take off. So I put that up at liveyourmessage.com/wings. So that’s liveyourmessage.com/wings. You can grab a copy of that.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. And we’ll make sure that that’s in the show notes. And of course you can find Marisa all over social media @liveyourmessage, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all over. Marisa I just want to thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Marisa Murgatroyd:       Oh yeah, if you’ve got wings so you go to start flying, right?

Melinda Wittstock:         Absolutely.

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