Episode 168: Why This Year Changed Everything For Me (Part 1)
In this raw and vulnerable episode, I'm unpacking the biggest lessons from my last year - from using grief to heal my relationship with my immigrant mom, to finally breaking free from toxic "grow at all costs" hustle culture. We'll dive deep into why nonstop growth is killing our businesses (only viruses and cancer grow without rest), and how learning to embrace "enoughness" completely transformed both my business and personal relationships. If you're tired of the pressure to constantly scale and ready to build a more intentional, human-centered business, this conversation is for you.
5 Crucial Lessons Every Small Business Owner Needs for Success
• Embrace grief as a stepping stone for growth in your business journey.
Build trust by listening and caring, not just solving problems.
Focus on meaningful goals and sustainable growth, not endless hustle.
Stop forcing outcomes; let what’s meant for your business come naturally.
Let your authenticity shine through; customers can sense your energy.
Boost your small business success with these simple, sustainable strategies: turn challenges into growth, listen actively, focus on meaningful goals, trust the process, and let your authenticity guide customer connections. Make your business thrive while staying true to your values!
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: Hello, small business heroes. Welcome back to Small Business PR, where we make PR and marketing super simple and accessible for the everyday PR hero. So usually on this podcast, I talk a lot about marketing, strategies, actionable tactical things, because I'm all about showing and not telling. But today, we're gonna do something a little bit more personal, a little bit more vulnerable.
00:00:19 Gloria: I just celebrated my birthday, another lap around the sun. And maybe like you too, I get a little bit, I don't know, reflective or emo on my birthday where I am made to think about what happened in the last year? What did I learn? What things did I fail at? How did I grow? My losses, my gains, all of those things. So this episode will be titled Part One of the 10 Things I Learned Last Year.
00:00:44 Gloria: And last year, whew, what a year was it for all of us, right? Whether it's politically, economically, the markets are changing, everything's shifting. I had people who said that this year is the wild, wild west year where we have no idea what's gonna happen because everything is just happening so fast and what used to work is no longer working. So as we are forced to reckon with this new reality of maybe figuring out what is it that is true for us when all of the other templates and things that we followed are no longer holding true, it's really an imitation for us to go inwards.
00:01:17 Gloria: So I'm just gonna start right off the bat and say that I had an amazing birthday. I had a really chill birthday with friends in Portugal. You might have seen it on my Instagram. I shared a little bit about how I'm in my lazy girl era where, you know, growing up as a child of immigrants of a single mom, parent household, I was told that hard work was our ticket to success and money was our ticket to freedom, right? It was all about that scarcity, that survival.
00:01:42 Gloria: And I spent a lot of time, and if you listen to this podcast, I talk a lot about healing that generational narrative and the trauma from my mom, you know, her being a widow and going through divorces and how that has imparted on me some survivalist and very unhealthy narratives about my worth and that hustle and grind culture. So um it was only recently, I wouldn't say this year, that I started to heal my relationship with my mother, who honestly, I've been kind of estranged from. I lost my dad when I was three.
00:02:10 Gloria: I probably lived with her for eight years of my entire life together. She is someone who is not only from a different culture, a different language, um you know, escaping communism, growing up in China. I was born in the States. It just felt like with all the years and culture and languages, the gap was way too wide, that there was no way for us to ever connect and understand each other. And so for years, I either avoided it or I really kind of felt like every time we did have to spend time, it was just not something that brought me ease.
00:02:41 Gloria: And I'm sure she felt it too. I didn't really show up for her. I didn't really feel a closeness with her. And I'm sure she felt it as well. And through all the years, we kind of just use the fact that we live on different continents as an excuse not to be close. And it was only through meeting and marrying my husband, who is also the only child, although from a very different household growing up, he's very close to his parents, did I realize this was my big puzzle to solve.
00:03:07 Gloria: And it was kind of a thorn on my side because everything else was going well, but my relationship with my mother was just one thing that I could not ever reconcile. And so the first thing that I learned last year, they kind of encapsulates everything was grief is our biggest teacher. And it was on this journey of exploring my mother's grief and all of its contours, the depth of her sorrow of being a widow and losing the love of her life and being in a new country with a baby and not really having any community, exploring all of that, all the lives that she wanted to have, all the opportunities, all the dreams she had that were unfulfilled, was I able to open up a space of true compassion.
00:03:47 Gloria: Now, obviously psychedelic assisted therapy has helped me a lot. I talk about this very openly. I'm also an angel investor in a venture fund that funds mental health and psychedelic assisted therapy projects. And so I am very bullish on psychedelics, but I'm also somebody who has transformed my life through the properties of psychedelics and how I've been able to surrender and soften and really lean into that love. And so psychedelics is something that has really changed my life.
00:04:15 Gloria: And it's only through exploring grief and surrendering to that grief and seeing my mother's grief was I able to soften into not being combative and being like, why don't you understand me? Why did you never call me all these years? All the things that I used to hold against her, it kind of just washed away because I viscerally, like in my bones, in my psychedelic assisted therapy journey, felt her deep, deep grief and sorrow.
00:04:41 Gloria: And grief is something that's interesting. It's something that we try to avoid. It's something that we think is just the opposite of anything that we want, right? So we try to keep it at arm's length, but honestly, grief was my biggest teacher in all of this. And it's uncomfortable, it's sad, it's a feeling that we don't really want to have near us. But I promise you there's a lot more to grief than just that pain and sorrow.
00:05:07 Gloria: Because what's on the other side, oftentimes it's greater compassion. It's having that love, whether it's unexpressed love or love that could have been there that reflected back at you. So my biggest lesson throughout all of this, and that's why I had to put it at number one, is that grief was my ultimate teacher in my healing journey. So I invite you to explore your grief. And obviously, in a way that's comfortable for you with support. But I think a lot of times we just throw grief to the side when it actually, it was the catalyst for all of my transformation.
00:05:41 Gloria: I just had my wedding in Sicily with my husband and I had a full circle moment with my mom. I dedicated speeches to her. She was beaming. I even had his first dance with her. And to see that level of connection, and I actually had someone who went to middle school with me who knew the strife I had with my mother. She said that when she saw those wedding videos as she started crying because she knows that this was a journey that I have been on since I met her basically at age 11.
00:06:07 Gloria: And you know, our relationship is not perfect. You know, my mom is still her and I'm still me. I cannot change the past, but exploring her grief and having compassion for it was what made me ultimately have so much love for her where all of the things that I had anger about kind of just allowed me to not feel as triggered and not be as reactive.
00:06:27 Gloria: And so now when she says things that are triggering for me that usually would elicit a response that would heighten to the point where we're yelling at each other, like on a public street corner, which has happened, I created a space before I reacted. And again, we don't agree on everything, but has really taught me to have way more compassion for someone who also went through a lot of grief too. So it's not just about me, it's about exploring that. So that's number one.
00:06:53 Gloria: Number two is I've learned that, you know, through this last year. So for those of you who may or may not know, my husband has been laid off for over a year and it's been hard on him. And me as the entrepreneur, quick action-taking person, I was always the one trying to go in and solve everything. Everything needed to be fixed, action, action, action. I remember like, if I didn't get things my way, because I'm a very kind of like persistent person, I would figure out a 12 part like action plan on how I can turn that no into a yes.
00:07:25 Gloria: And so although that's made me a really good entrepreneur and a pitch writer and someone who can really help pitch my clients for media, the second lesson I learned is that sometimes being a good friend, a good partner is not trying to solve or fix and just simply sitting there and holding space for someone, whether that's in silence or just not knowing what to do and expressing that.
00:07:49 Gloria: A lot of times, I feel like it's kind of rewiring our default narrative. My default narrative is to what I see a problem, squash it faster than a mad woman squashing flies. Right. And I just get into action mode. But in the case of my husband, I realized that we're very different in the way that we orientate. I'm an entrepreneur. He's not an entrepreneur. And so what he needed from me was just to listen and just to be there for him and to commiserate instead of giving him all this tough love and mindset of like, you can do it and action and all the things that I'm so used to doing with our PR community.
00:08:23 Gloria: And so it's a different hat that I'm learning to wear. But I realized that when I do again, it's all about softening and being in that gentle presence when I don't rush to fix everything, I just simply sit in allowance of that uncomfortable thing. Whether it's grief, whether it's challenge, whether it's somebody going through a hard time that actually is way more valuable to them than me trying to like play therapists or trying to help them solve things and spring into action mode. So that's number two. And I’m I'm still learning that lesson, but I've become aware of it and where my blind spots are. And so I'm trying to lean more into that.
00:08:59 Gloria: The third lesson of the last year is with all of the market downturn and the changes in consumer behavior, this whole capitalistic nonstop growth hustle mentality, I think it's very unhealthy and toxic and needs to stop. And if you think about in the natural world, right? What grows year after year after year without stop? Viruses and cancer.
00:09:23 Gloria: If you look at the natural order of the universe, everything has its ups and downs and cycles, but somehow we as entrepreneurs have convinced ourselves that we are somehow extracted from this equation and these laws don't pertain to us. And so for a long time, I read all the books, I followed all the coaches, and it was this constant energy of more, more, more, more, more, push harder, do more.
00:09:47 Gloria: And although I do think that hard work is important, right? I think that we're entering into a new phase of business where we are reevaluating what that benchmark or that result of more is. And we're realizing that the money, which is how most people calculate, you know, the output of our efforts or whether or not something is successful, that money is actually quite a poor measurement of success or just a value. It's definitely one measure, but it's not all of the measures.
00:10:15 Gloria: And so as I lean into my lazy girl era, as I experience a year of cataclysmic shift for myself and my team, earlier this year I talked about going from a team of seven to a team of three, which was very difficult for me. I had to do a lot of work and grieving that and thinking, okay, why is it that people are either leaving me or that this is happening? Um I had to realize like, maybe it's all for the better.
00:10:37 Gloria: And so now that I have a much more ease, like ease of business in the sense that I'm not trying to do all the things. I'm not trying to have 20 different projects that are all top priority because they cannot. And really enjoying this year where I had a wedding and I got my family together and I've also gone to three other friends' weddings and it's been a lot of travel for us and, you know, my husband being laid off. Just realizing that like this nonstop, like year over year metric that we have for constantly growing is not working for me as a measure of my success.
00:11:09 Gloria: And so I look at my revenue. It's definitely, you know, top line revenue has gone down but my profitability is actually much higher because I have a much more lean team. I am not spending my days always trying to manage people, which is something that I don't actually enjoy that much. And all those meetings are replaced with actually talking to my customers and getting feedback from them.
00:11:30 Gloria: And I've been able to co-create with my customers and have such a high touch point with my customers in a way that allows me to see like, what is it that they want? How can I serve them better? And it's been able to have me come up with better ideas and just serve them at a better higher level.
00:11:45 Gloria: And I think with everyone being, you know, quote unquote, coached out and being scammed by a lot of people, honestly, who are, you know, saying that they're a coach, but then don't give them any personalized feedback, um I really think that what I'm leaning into is something that's a little bit more empathetic, something that's a little bit more human, and to bring that back into my business.
00:12:05 Gloria: So the goal is no longer to just push for as many people in my PR program as possible, but getting the right people, the people who, honestly, are on the same journey as me. Maybe people who are women and of color and also children of immigrants who understand that it's not just about business or success, it's about learning how to take up space and feeling comfortable to promote ourselves because we traditionally have not been feeling safe in many of those spaces.
00:12:30 Gloria: So it's so much more than that. And so I invite you, if you do feel like your experience has shift in your business or that the revenue has gone down, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's allowing you to just strip away all the other bullshit and figure out, what are the three things that I really wanna focus on and just let everything else go?
00:12:50 Gloria: Which brings me to my fourth thing, which is that anything that's meant for you will come to you sooner or later. And I know this is kind of something that you maybe read on a meme or a coffee mug, um but I really have in this season of descaling and simplifying and not being on all the stages and being on people's podcasts all the time, I'm realizing that the people who I actually wanted to collaborate with, they're gonna come to me when the time is right.
00:13:14 Gloria: And so when I did take a lot of time off this year for my wedding and for other people's weddings and traveling and just family things, it was really interesting to see that what I thought was gonna be a really low period for revenue that people were actually coming out of the woodworks to work with me, which is very interesting, right? Because it's like, when you think about stepping back, you don't think about things going as planned, but when you just keep doing you in an authentic way, our marketing has definitely changed.
00:13:40 Gloria: I had a CMO and basically delegated all of my writing to that person. And I realized it wasn't working anymore and my account wasn't growing. But the moment I took back all of my writing, my audience started to resonate with me. People are starting to come out of the woodworks to work with me. People from years ago who maybe saw my content but weren't ready or people who just are experiencing a different shift and can connect to my story now that I'm sharing more about kind of what I'm going through and the journey that I'm on separate to PR.
00:14:09 Gloria: So you have to lean into trust. You have to know that in a time like this when if you do wanna simplify, if you do wanna descale, that trusting that everything that will happen that's meant for you will come to you, that is the magnetic energy that we all need to lean into. And it's really powerful too because it's not coming from this like pushy, like, oh my God, you have to join my program. And I kind of look at my previous sales tactics and they were kind of hard selling. You know, I was like really pushing and I realized like no amount of pushing that I did will make someone feel ready.
00:14:40 Gloria: And the moment I stepped back and had changed my marketing and to talk more about the phases that I'm in and how I am trusting and leaning with trust, people who have, you know, no matter how many emails I send would not work with me are now wanting to work with me. So trust me when I say that what is meant for you will be for you.
00:14:57 Gloria: Now, obviously that comes from a place of privilege, right? When you're just starting your business, you want to take this with a grain of salt. You do need to have that work ethic and that consistency and probably push a little harder in the beginning, just so you can reach that critical mass. But once you do, I don't think that you need to keep maintaining it at that level unless you want to get burnt out. And I'm someone who actually has survived burnout after having an 11 centimeter fibroid removed from my uterus in an open C-section kind of surgery. And I'm here to tell you like, absolutely when you lean into trust and you change your marketing, people feel it, especially now more than ever.
00:15:34 Gloria: And I, and maybe you're listening to this and you're kind of nodding because I do think that is the shift that we are all going through as customers when we are oversold to, and we've overbought and now we're like, who out there is really for me? Who really gives a damn about me? And it is my mission to really stand out from the other coaches who are just trying to get people in a big group with no personalized help. Because just by showing a little bit more empathy and humanity, people will catch on to that.
00:15:57 Gloria: So the, so part 5 of my 10 lessons that I've learned from this year around the sun, and it was a crazy year for all of us. So many beautiful, big things happen, but so many painful things happen too, is that whether or not you are spiritual, right? Our customers can energetically 100% feel where we're coming from. And it's kind of related to the last one where you lean into trust, but our customer's ability to sense our energy in this day and age is the most powerful and strongest as it's ever been, I believe, in the history of marketing and business.
00:16:34 Gloria: Because now we have so many people who have access to information, who can automate, who can copy other people. And so because it's so saturated and we're consuming information at a rate that's really unprecedented, we become naturally very good curators of information and we have a better filter. So our customers absolutely can understand and grasp our energy. They have an intuition whether or not they express it or not, whether or not they can verbalize it or not. And so your marketing, your energy that you put into that will absolutely be felt on the other end. Like trust me when I say this.
00:17:11 Gloria: And so, you know, again, it's leaning back into what customers are feeling. It's not to say, well, people aren't buying anymore. That's absolutely not true. People are still buying, but the same old tired marketing tactics, and actually always love to make fun of marketing bros where it's just like more, more, more, close, close, like it's not working anymore, at least not from my audience.
00:17:30 Gloria: So next time when you're buying a template or you're getting coaching from someone who is saying that they've done six figures, there's seven figures, really examine if that sits with your intuition. And if that way of measuring success is going to really get you to where you need to go, are they gonna give you that personalized support? Are they really going to be the one to create a space where you can feel comfortable to do the work that you need to do?
00:17:55 Gloria: Because people can give you templates all day of strategies they've used to get to seven, eight, nine figures. But if it was just about the strategies, everybody would be there, right? And so it's really about connecting to your own intuition, digging out what is your truly aligned, most talented, highest self, and then relaying that to your customer.
00:18:10 Gloria: And a lot of times when we do follow other people who maybe have all the accolades, right, who talk a big game, they're just diluting our power. And so I just really welcome you to sit with your intention and to trust that your intuition and the one of your customers are getting more heightened and stronger than ever, and that's actually a good thing. So then we can start to actually attract our tribe.
00:18:33 Gloria: And so we're kind of back into this day of marketing where people are getting more and more picky, but that means that when they do join you, like the people in my community, the community is really thriving because it's full of really engaged people. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me recently, Gloria, I'm so glad I found you. I've been looking for someone like this for a while. And I guess I wasn't ready, but now I am. And all of a sudden your thing popped up on my feed. This is something happening in the universe. I don't know if it's like synchronicity, but so many people have told me this. And so it goes back to what I'm saying is like, you know, your intention, your intuition and your customers have never been stronger. And you just got to lean into that.
00:19:09 Gloria: So again, I don't know how woo woo you are, but I've been definitely on my spiritual journey. So this part one is a little bit more on the fluffier spiritual side. I'm going to record part two with some other things that I've learned, which will help you in your business as well. So stay tuned for next week, which is part two.
00:19:25 Gloria: And if you know anyone who is a small business owner, who is a woman of color, who is a BIPOC founder, who maybe traditionally didn't feel comfortable to promote or pitch themselves and to take up space, tell them to listen to this podcast. Tell them to watch the PR Masterclass, which will show you exactly step-by-step how to get featured and how to do it in a way that's authentic to you. And you can go to gloriachoupr.com/masterclass to watch it now.
00:19:51 Gloria: And as always, thank you so much for being here. This is why I record this. This is why I take the time to do this. It's for you. And I'm so happy that week after week you are still here and your presence and your attention means the world to me. So thank you so much and I'll see you next week.
00:20:08 Gloria: Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
00:20:36 Gloria: Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at gloriachoupr.com/masterclass. That's gloriachou, C-H-O-U, pr.com/masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.