You are Unique, You Have No Competition

Val:

Hey, this is Val Selby, and after over 20 years online, I can track where my mindset has blocked me. If procrastination, imposter syndrome, and a lack of focus have been blocking your biz, then Vowel Full Volume is here to help you see choices you are making. Get ready to use your expertise to collaborate like a pro as you create the business of your dreams. Now is the time to make changes and live your best life. Let's get to it. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Val:

I am so glad you are here today listening to me. I cannot believe that we are firmly flowing right into the middle of Q2. That's insane to me and obvious of why I feel like time is flying. I have a lot of non work stuff scheduled and it's amazing, but it also makes my work days go a lot quicker because I'm like, holy crap. How can I fit 72 hours into 24? Or not even 24. Like, I don't work 24 hours in a day. How can I fit 72 hours into 10 hours? There's just there's so much going on and I want to do all it and I will do all of it. I'm just getting better at outsourcing.

Val:

I am getting much better at realizing things that I want to do. I don't want to do push aside, trust my gut like we talked about last week, which leads me to what we're gonna talk about this week because I brought it up last week And I'm so proud of myself, Jamie, for remembering that we're gonna talk about competition today. And yes, I'm patting myself on the back for remembering that because if we don't pat ourselves on the back, who the hell is going to pat our backs? We should acknowledge when we do something we're happy about, when we're proud of. And even when that being proud is something as freaking simple as remembering what I said last week. I wanted to talk about in the podcast this week without knowing where I wrote it down. Lord only knows where I wrote it down. Vacation brain's real. I don't think I'm fully back yet.

Val:

And here I am. I'm ready to go on some other trips. So I think vacation summer is just gonna be the brain that I have. It's just gonna be the thing, and I'm just going to embrace it because it's me. So I have been working on getting more organized with my stuff since I am out of town a little bit more this summer than the previous years, which is awesome because we're finally ramping up more time off. However, my business has never been at this level before. So that's just like a whole new thing of all of this amazingness. Oh, it was I think this is what they're talking about.

Val:

And when they say, can you have it all? I'm in it right now. Can I have it all? I couldn't have it all when I had the kids. I couldn't, when the kids were home and I was raising them, it wasn't a thing. It was, that level was too much, too much for me. And that's just for me. I've seen other women do it, and I will pat them on the back and give them the kudos for that because that's what they wanted to achieve and that's what they did. That didn't work for me. Now's my time.

Val:

So this is me. And I'm realizing this, this is me doing everything she wants and it can be weird and scary at the same time. That's it's awesome. I was emailing back and forth with a friend about it. I'm like, everything's going so great that old me would have sat here and gone, oh god. What's gonna happen? Of course, something's gonna happen. Of course, it is because something always happens. I mean, we just got back from vacation and our freaking fridge broke.

Val:

Right? That's life. That is life. It's not even a you get a negative for a positive. It's just life. I mean, our stove is starting to go out to all of the appliances are the same age, barely new or, I mean, barely old because plants just don't last long now. Let me keep the squirrels going. But I could easily just sit there and go, oh my god. Of course.

Val:

We just got back from our vacation and here it is. We're probably gonna have to go get a new fridge and blah blah blah. And old me would have traveled right down there and loved it. It had the best time going down in that negative swoop. Of course, we can't do anything because we can't spend any money because shit breaks when we do it. Instead, didn't look at it that way. I was like, all right, well, if we have to get a new fridge, we're gonna have to get a new fridge. There's nothing we can do about that.

Val:

Right? You gotta gotta have a fridge in your kitchen, or at least I do. I need to have a fridge in my kitchen. And thankfully, we just you know, we didn't get upset. Well, I didn't get upset. My husband's not the upset kind of guy. So he does pretty good as a firefighter. Right? I'm the keyed up amped up to his yellow teddy bear. And he just starts researching, of course, and we're looking and we're researching.

Val:

Now this is usually when I would amp up. Right? And it was so great because I wasn't amped up at all. I was just like, alright, well, let's figure out parts. And I had plans. I was gonna go and hang out and check out a new nursery and go get some plants. And I was like, alright. Well, I'm gonna get dressed. Do I need to go to the store somewhere? Because he's on call right now.

Val:

So he can't really go way over into the big city. I'm like, okay, so I'll just get dressed and change plans. I'll go get whatever part we need. And we found the part. We're Amazon ing and of course, you this is more than you care about. Right? But the big thing to me was that I'm not looking at now what? Of course. We can't do anything good. We can't do anything fun.

Val:

We can't spend any money because if we do, this is always gonna happen kind of thing. And I was like, no. No. That's not. Even if we hadn't gone on vacation, we would have still had this happen. It's just the age of the shitty cheap appliances. And and I don't mean cheap as in they didn't cost much. I mean, cheap as in that's how they're built now.

Val:

So they'll break. Competition. That's what we're supposed to be talking about today. Competition. And I squirreled. So I was super happy to remember as I was like, okay. I have to record to record this week. What are we gonna talk about? And I went, oh, yay.

Val:

Last week, I said what we were gonna talk about. We're talking about competition. So let's see where this leads, which if you're brand new, you don't know what that means. But have you been here a little while? You know, I I like squirrels. Squirrels love me. And I don't map out my podcasts before. So that was you can tell on some of them. Like the beginning of this one, You can tell on some of the podcasts because it's like, bring it back, Val.

Val:

Bring it back. Bring it back. Are you gonna come back? Are you gonna come around? Do you even remember what the fuck you're talking about? Not always. Not always. So I don't have outlines. I sometimes do have key points if it's something that I'm like, I might forget about this. But this one, I didn't wanna sit down and actually, like, map it out. This one, I wanted to just free flow because the concept is still a little new to me.

Val:

So I think if I just free flow, there's gonna be even more useful information that's just gonna pop out of my face. And I love it when I can get into free fall, always could start talking about it. Now maybe the fact that the squirrels are here so much at the beginning of this and I'm like seem to be procrastinating is because I feel like I'm procrastinating right now. I don't ever do retakes. No. I don't that's not I don't always never. I rarely ever do a retake on a podcast. I usually just jump on here and we're gonna go and there it is.

Val:

This is what happened. And I had to start the recording over because it went yeah, I mean, you think I got squirrels going on right now? The first try at it was just like, I don't even know if Val is in the same room as her topic anymore. She has gone someplace else, and there's no way to bring it back. So I actually restarted this one. And the fact that I'm rambling means I'm starting to hit on something for myself. That is always what this kind of rambling means. My members and my coaching clients are used to it because it's just kind of like a, hang on. I'm gonna work through this.

Val:

You're gonna watch me work through this. This is gonna help you work through some of your stuff when you have to work through it because I am gonna process this right here right now in front of you. Talk it out, which is what I want all of my clients and the members, which I think of as clients to be doing as well. When something feels like a little bit different, Makes you act a certain way? Just pay attention to that flag. Go, okay. Where are we gonna take this? What is it? So competition. Let's actually start the conversation about competition. Do you believe that you have competition? In the truest sense of the word? Usually I will look up a word, so I have the dictionary there, but I'm not looking it up.

Val:

I'm a competitive person, really competitive person by nature. I love sports, fantasy football, and I'm always pissed off if I don't make it to the finals. It's just I'm competitive. I am. And there's a major difference now in competitive for fantasy football, for competitive for if I actually got my ass out there running again and was doing half marathons. There's a different part of competition for that. And I think part of what I learned as a track coach, See, I'm totally working this out right now as a track coach was the fact that when I was working with my kids, I was teaching them to better themselves. This is how I knew that I was a mindset coach, and all good coaches are mindset coaches because it's all about the mindset.

Val:

I was always pushing them to improve their PR, their personal record always. And if there was somebody that was gonna be faster than them, I didn't ask them to set unrealistic goals. You know, I mean, some of these kids, I got them some crazy awesome PRs for them, their personal records. Right? They weren't going on to state. They weren't ever gonna go do anything in college. It was never that. It was just about being there and hanging out and competing and bettering themselves. And we learn.

Val:

And I say we, because I was part of that process of learning as well, that we didn't have to constantly be looking at that person in front of us as real competition in a negative way. In fact, for some, it really helped because we're just like, you know what? This person is really, really fast. She's amazing. You know, we've seen her. We saw her run last year, the year before. We watched her at state, cheered for her. And I want you to just work at staying with her because if you stay with her, you are going to get your best time ever. Right? So we would use that competition for positive.

Val:

And it really helped me start the process, which has taken me a little bit because I didn't know how much I was getting wrapped up in this whole competition thing. On and now I'll bring it back to business. I promise right now. I didn't realize how I was looking at people that were, you know, managers running other events, because we're, we're, I'm going to go back to that part of my business life. When I was managing events, I didn't realize how much I was looking at any of those other people as the enemy. That's an extreme word, but as the enemy, as competition in a negative light. I was looking at him going, oh my. And then I'd looking at stuff and going, oh my God, I can't believe they're doing that and this and that.

Val:

Totally negative. Right? I mean, just the negative thoughts were coming in. And when I stopped doing that and started doing the learning process of, okay, well, what are they doing? Well, I wonder why they're doing that. And actually using things as a proactive, if looking at it a productive way, looking at a positive, all the peace, positive way of looking at it, things really, really, really started to shift because what happened was I got rid of competition and I embraced collaboration like crazy. I mean, it was already collaborating with a bunch of people, but I was limiting myself. And it was kind of like, oh my God, we can't talk about that event coming up because what if somebody creates that event right before we do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's happened, it's happened over and over again. I know people that have ran events that I have ran for other clients before for multiple years and they know that it's coming up and they purposely ran very, very similar.

Val:

If not, almost exactly the same thing right before, couple weeks before. I've had it happen to me even with bundle bash where people did that. And when I was in that space of competition, I was just like, oh my god. Really fucking hate you. Why would you do this? And you get all negative and down and you're like, I hate people. People suck. This is why people suck. Instead of just looking at it and going, okay.

Val:

I understand this concept of the copying is a form of flattery. And I'm like, so maybe we can just kind of pay attention to that. Maybe we can pay attention to, okay, so this did happen. Do we really think that they were being bitches or could it just have been a decent time for? Okay. Well, we can give the benefit of the doubt. We can take a look and then we can contact them and go, Hey, did you have great people in there that would be good for any future events for me? And reach out instead of being gloomy and attached to it. So here's the thing about competition. You don't have any.

Val:

It's really that simple. You have no competition. None. And I mean that in a super positive way. I mean that because nobody can create what you can create and how you create it and how you deliver it and how you market it. Every piece of that could be similar. Like this could be similar to this person. This, you know, marketing could be similar to this person.

Val:

You might have bits and pieces, but the way you put the everything together is 100% unique to you. I haven't looked at the stats, but I know previously there was like 5,000,000,000 people online. There's room for 2 of us that are doing something similar. There's room for a 100 of us that are doing something similar. Shit. There's room for probably 10,000 of us doing something similar when we're pulling from 5 1,000,000,000 people online. Right? So if we start looking at everybody as, okay, what can I learn from them? For 1, what can I learn from them? 2, what would it look like if I started working with them? You don't even have to have what that would look like. You could just instantly have, Hey, you know what? I'm feeling the vibe.

Val:

Like, if I wasn't in this, I would probably go and sign up for their stuff. If I wasn't already in this and already learning this, I kinda wanna sign up anyways to see how they're doing it different. That's the other part of I don't have competition anymore as I do. I really like signing up for stuff, not to steal it, but just to be like, oh my god. What are they doing different? Because even that some of the stuff that they're doing different, I'm not gonna be able to deliver it that way because it's not me. So keep it on track. Keep it on track. So contact them.

Val:

Reach out to them. If you are in a similar market, even if you're doing similar things, I don't care if you're brand new or if you've been doing it for decades, reach out to them and just say, hey. I noticed that we do, you know, something similar, but what you're doing attracted my attention, and I would just love to connect and see how maybe we could possibly collaborate or just have conversation about this same topic that we both love. Keep it super simple. Don't self promote. Do not self promote. Unless you're specifically recruiting for something that's totally different. But if you're just doing a reach out to have conversation with somebody who's technically air quotes competition, just keep it a conversation.

Val:

You know, like you'd be sitting there and talking, chatting, chatting, having your coffee or your wine. Do that. Do that. When they do the notes, they're gonna put them down there. 2, 3, Add them down there for you guys. Please do because I can't even recap. This is what happens when I start going in flow. I can't recap.

Val:

Usually, I can come back through and go, okay. Well, first was this, second was that, 3rd was that? Nope, nope, nope, nope. They're flowing and they're coming right out of my brain and then they're gone. Because it's trying to make room for the next one. So once I started paying attention to, I don't have any competition. You don't have any competition. Once I started paying attention to that, it just opened up so much more. I had technically been worried about putting out, you know, our events at bundle bash so far ahead.

Val:

Right? Because I had watched people do that to my clients and even to myself of, okay, well, that's up. Well, fine. Frick. I'll just do it 6 weeks before she does or 2 weeks before you she does or the week before I had someone to do couple of somebody's do that before. And it's there, and I had to start realizing that could happen. There's nothing I can do about it. There's no reason I should stress about it. I need to do business the way I want to do it.

Val:

Remember we were talking last week about gut instinct. I need to do business the way I wanna do it, which means getting my events listed out well ahead. Like right now, they're not listed ahead and it's giving me anxiety. I love to have them listed ahead. And one major reason is because I'm constantly talking to people. I'm constantly collaborating with people. And that way, I can be just, like, having a conversation, and here we go. And all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my god.

Val:

I'm running an event. You just said that so and so does this. You know, can you hook me up as with an introduction and on from there, which is another thing for collaborations. That's awesome is, you know, talking and asking for introductions. And even if you're in the same area of expertise, you know, asking them, do you have a few other people that do this? Should we all get together and have a chat and see how we're doing it different so that we can get our own unique selling points? That's a new idea right there. Right there, a brainstorming session with people that are in the same niche. Mind explosion because everybody thinks competition. Oh my God.

Val:

We can't all get together because everybody will steal everybody's ideas. No, they can't. They can take your idea, but they'll never make your idea. But you will. Never. Never. Okay. I don't wanna scroll too much more for you, And I wanna keep this probably to whatever timeframe I'm on right now.

Val:

However, many minutes we are in. I don't wanna keep you too much longer because I want you out there implementing. I want you to pay attention to the word competition. What happens when you think of the people that are in your niche? Did you just tense up? Take a deep breath. If you did, take a deep breath or release it. Now if they are icky people, I don't want you reaching out, honestly, because I don't want you having the icky vibes attached to you. So if they're icky people, just freaking leave them alone. But there's plenty of non icky people in your niche out there.

Val:

So pay attention. Reach out to them. Make a connection. That's how collaboration works. And it can be really, really easy with people that are in your same niche that are supposed to be competitors. Then, oh, this was the other thing I needed to add. So, nope, we're not quite done yet. The other thing I wanted to add is I know a lot of coaches.

Val:

There's a lot of business coaches out there. Right? They're not gonna coach the way I do. No way. All our brains are so different. No way. We all coach so different. And there are lots of times where and this is why I have I like to get to know people before we start actually coaching together because we would not be a fit. It's distinctly possible that we're not gonna be a fit.

Val:

And especially if I know that I'm like looking at stuff and and going, okay, you need more help with this. And that is not my air area of expertise. Right? So I'm not just gonna take your money because that's super bad karma. I'm not just gonna take their money and try to muddle through it. It's like, okay. You know what? I know somebody. I have coach a and coach b. I'm gonna introduce you to them, check them out, have a call with them, get to know them, see.

Val:

I think that they would be a better fit because they specialize in x. Whatever it is, I don't feel like I have enough information to really help them with. And that always comes back. And the more that I have done had conversations with people that are competitors with me, the more shared information has gone out between all of us together. That's a beautiful thing because it led me to start really believing that I don't have any competition. Because we can all have the same ideas, but we're not going to deliver it the same way. And that's the beauty of it. So have the conversations, reach out to people that are in your niche.

Val:

Tell them, hey, you know what? When I have somebody and I don't think they're a good fit, I would really love it if I could send them your way to have a conversation. I personally have given up on the whole, I need to have an affiliate link or anything like that. I'm not looking for the money compensation. I'm looking for the universal compensation of paying it forward. Because the more I send people that aren't a good fit for me to people, I think that they will be a good fit to, the more I see other people do the same for me. That's pretty beautiful. Pretty beautiful. Okay.

Val:

Now I'm gonna leave it at that because it was definitely the I should probably write some notes down every once in a while, but it came to me before we stopped recording. So perfect. All right. You're having a beautiful week of hope. I think beautiful is my word right now. I hope that you connect with somebody that you can have a really great conversation with and maybe you guys can do a little collaboration or just sharing or, you know, whatever that looks like. Be open. Don't worry about what it has to look like.

Val:

Just be open to having the conversation and seeing where it goes. Could be nowhere. And that's all right. Because what you did was you put yourself out there, you put your business out there a little bit because it's in your email signature. Right? And I assume that you probably emailed somebody or they went and looked at your Facebook profile or, you know, however you contacted them. So you've made a little bit of a connection. And that's what business is all about is connecting, connecting with the next person. Cause we don't know how us touching those people will improve everything that we're doing.

Val:

Okay. All right. I'm looking forward to the summer and more sunshine and some more warmth because it's freaking cold up here in the Seattle area right now. I hope that you're having a wonderful week and I will chat at you next week. Bye bye.