813 Diane Mueller:

When we do pleasurable things and we do certain things that actually raise oxytocin, the pleasure hormone levels, we actually see hormones (fade music softly) get balanced. We see weight regulates. We see we sleep better. We see that cortisol, the stress hormone, regulates. It actually changes the way our neurological system processes things. If we’re having a hard time making decisions and there’s a level of, like, “I don’t know what to do, I’m not clear, all these different paths of these choices, they all have pros and cons, I can’t see it,” stepping away and having time to sink into pure pleasure is where we are allowing our brain to actually work in a different way. When we do that, we can have different ideas and creative solutions to spontaneously arise as a benefit from actually stepping away and re-regulating our hormones and our stress and taking a moment for joy.

Launching and growing a business requires a level of dedication that can easily take over your life – it can seem like our work is never done. All too often that translates into overwhelm and burnout. That’s why my guest today Diane Mueller says our success depends on making time to enjoy the journey, that we often accomplish more by putting our own pleasure first.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur on a mission to help women entrepreneurs overcome overwhelm.

Dr. Diane Mueller is the founder of Femme Meets Fortune, teaching women entrepreneurs how to accelerate the growth of their companies by building enterprises they genuinely enjoy running rather than ones that “run” their lives. CEO and Founder of two other businesses, the medical practice My Lyme Doc and community My Libido Doc, she shares today how she juggles all that without burnout or getting spread too thin.

Diane will be here in a moment, and first,

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As women it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people. That urge to people please, multi-task, and do everything perfectly leads to overwhelm and burnout for many female founders – and it also stunts business growth.

Our businesses end up running us, instead of us running our businesses.

There is a better way, and it involves prioritizing your own pleasure.  It’s easier said than done, because we can all so easily get wrapped up in an endless to-do list and end up running faster and faster without getting anywhere.

Dr. Diane Mueller runs three businesses and as the founder of Femme Meets Fortune, she helps women entrepreneurs accelerate the growth of their businesses by building companies they enjoy, and today she shares her system that evolved out of her own “rice and bean” years building three successful companies as she struggled with Lyme Disease.

Diane, who also runs My Lyme Doc and My Libido Doc, says that when we prioritize time in our schedules to simply have fun, we also balance our hormones, regulate stress, and experience clarity of thought and inspiration. In other words, we get more done when we are focused on being instead of just doing.

Today she shares the three commitments women must make in order to succeed, and much more, so let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Diane Mueller and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Diane, welcome to Wings.

Diane Mueller:

Thank you, Melinda. Excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I’m excited to have you, that you could fit me into your schedule, given the fact that you run not just one business or two businesses, but actually three. I want to start with Femme Meets Fortune because you described it as a side project to help women entrepreneurs. What are the main issues or struggles that women entrepreneurs are dealing with generally?

Diane Mueller:

One of the things that I really see is overwhelm and trying to do everything oneself. Women, we are so naturally programmed with how our brains function. I’m going to talk about the answer to your question even slightly in a medical way. Since I am a doctor, I look at business and medicine in so many ways as actually quite similar. One of the things that will happen with women is, because of what estrogen does to our brains, estrogen actually makes us really, really good at noticing all the little details of what’s wrong in the surroundings, around multitasking, around seeing so many different things that need to be attended to, which has its inherent value. Like anything, there’s strengths and weaknesses with so many different components of life. One of the struggles that happens with estrogen in the female brain is that it can lead to easy overwhelm. One of the biggest things that I find is trying to do everything oneself, going into overwhelm really quickly, and basically trying to take on so much that nothing is actually done totally well. I’ll pause here because I imagine that’s going to lead into some follow-up questions.

Melinda Wittstock:

We see this all the time. When you combine it, actually, with perfectionism, which, in my experience, with all the women I’ve mentored, and just how many times that comes up on this podcast, when you combine an urge towards perfectionism with that multitasking, have to do it all to have it all kind of thing, that’s definitely a recipe, not only for burnout and health problems, but it just stalls the growth of any business, which could be part of the reason why, not the only reason, but part of the reason why only three percent of women entrepreneurs make it to more than a million dollars in their annual revenues.

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s one of the biggest things. There’s a great book out there by Dan Sullivan and Doctor Benjamin Hardy called “Who Not How.” I feel like just the premise, you can even tell by the title of the book, the premise of what this book goes into. Really well done. But the essence of the book really comes down to exactly that, around so many times we think that, in order to get to wherever our goals are professionally, we need to do it ourselves. We don’t have the money. We don’t have, say, a bank backing us. We don’t think we can afford somebody. Then we just try to figure it out ourselves.

But the problem with that is that really can lead to a lot of overwhelm, as well as not hiring the people that actually know how to do certain things better than us. A lot of building businesses and staying out of overwhelm and multitasking and really enjoying the process is putting together systems and strategies for what can you start taking off your plate as soon as possible? Who can do it better than you? How can you begin to arrange things in your overhead and your life so that you can slowly start chipping away at your task by actually finding more hoops? It’s such a good book to really illustrate that point.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’ve found that a lot of women tend to put off hiring, perhaps too late. Even if your first hire, say, in a business is an executive assistant or a VA of some kind, working just even a couple hours a week, if that frees you up to make that sale or make the use of your time more effective, that’s going to be a game changer for your business. Yet I think often we can make the mistake of looking at hiring as an expense rather than as an investment. How do you help women hire the right people, the who, early enough in the game in their companies?

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. I like to take women through a exercise I call the boxes exercise. It’s basically getting a big piece of paper or a poster board or a whiteboard, whatever you want to use, and making a bunch of boxes. In every box, put every activity you do. Now, I mean every activity, meaning if you have a brick-and-mortar where you take out the trash, that goes in a box. If you make sure all the bills get paid, if you call the companies when credit card needs changing, anything that is your job related to business, and it’s nice to do this in personal life, too, but from the business standpoint, every single job goes down. Most women, when they do this, it is not uncommon to have over 100 different boxes. That’s the first level of, like, “Holy cow.”

Melinda Wittstock:

You don’t even realize because there’s so many things that you just do, just even in your given day. It’s not just the business things. It’s all the other things. It’s like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. Just ahead of this call I’m going to put on the laundry. Oh, yeah. Then here’s this thing for the dog, and then a kid.” When you add all those things in as well.

Diane Mueller:

Yes. Exactly Right. When you think about all these things, it is. It’s a ton of different things. So level one is really just looking at this and saying, “Taking bird’s eye view, a logical way of looking at this, would it be logical to say that this is actually sustainable?” It’s pretty easy to look at all of these different things and be like, “Oh, yeah.” Like you said, you used the word burnout, like, “I’m going to get burnt out if I continue this pace.” So some of it, I find that knowledge is so helpful for making decisions because it’s so easy to be like, “Well, it can’t be that bad. It’s just taking out the trash.” But when you could see all of it compounding, that’s really the first standpoint.

Then the next stand with this boxes activity is then to go through, and you can use a number system, you can use a color coding system, but the idea is to essentially rate the boxes. We’re rating them with the jobs that are the most essential that you do, that they would be hard to train for, that they’re your highest level of power in your business, your unique skillset. That could be a certain color, or it could be a 10, all the way down to, like, “Well, I’m doing this because it has to happen. It’s part of it. The trash needs to be taken out. But it’s a really easy thing to train for.” Which could be a one or a different color.

What you’re doing with this, you’re not just giving yourself insight, but you’re actually building your job description out of your task so that when you could say, “Well, if you’ve rated these jobs from one to 10, then jobs one to three, well, these are the things that don’t require your skillset.” That’s your job description. Like you said, even if it’s starting with two hours a week, but that two hours a week, now you’re able to put more into your greater task, it’s amazing how quickly that will actually turn back into revenue.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s really prioritizing your time. Where is the most leverage? If I do this one thing today, which one thing has a multiplicity of outcomes? Which one drives the business forward if I have to choose? I think when you start to get into that mindset of actually having clarity, but I think sometimes we fall in the trap of thinking. I guess maybe it’s because of that estrogen thing. We think we’re good multitaskers, but that doesn’t make it so.

Diane Mueller:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

There are lots of studies that show that when people multitask, they have a context switching, 15 to 30 minutes, when their minds are partly in what they were doing, but they’re not 100% in what they’re doing next. The context switch just loses lots of actual focused capacity.

Diane Mueller:

Oh, 100%. 100%. I mean, that’s where all the concept of Pomodoro Technique or block scheduling and these types of things around block, work, then break, and these little tiny things that people do around how many times do you check your email a day? Every time you check your email in the middle of a task, what you’re talking about, you’re basically exactly, you’re moving your brain. You can literally lose 10 to 30 minutes of effective brain time just by stopping what you’re doing and having that impulse to be like, “I have to check my social media,” or “I have to check my email,” or “I have to check my text,” or whatever it is. So becoming more focused, certain parts of the day, I actually have my phone turned off, on days where I’m just really working on my business, for that reason around these points of the day are just for this project. I can’t be interrupted. It’s amazing what can happen from productivity when we are actually that focused.

Melinda Wittstock:

I even calendarize these things.

Diane Mueller:

Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’ve got something called deep work. If I’m in that, I’m working on my business, not in it. That’s a big distinction, too, knowing the difference between working on it or in it.

Diane Mueller:

I feel like a lot of people are becoming more … I think so many of us in the business world talk about that. So I think people are becoming more and more aware of the differences. But I think the problem is, even though people are aware of the differences, it’s really good to have reminders because it’s so easy. One of the things that I find that happens with dopamine and how dopamine works on the body, every time we actually get a task done, like send an email out, we actually get a dopamine hit in our brain. Our brain releases dopamine. That makes us feel productive. That makes us feel motivated. It makes us feel like we did something.

One of the things that can happen when we’re just tasking things that are in our business, not working on the bigger picture of on our business, I know in another podcast interview you did I heard you guys talk about the difference between in the business as the current projects, and then on the business as thinking about your future. I love that way of defining it. So many times I think what can wind up happening is, when we’re working in the business and we’re doing the day-to-day of the acute things that need to get done to keep it running, oftentimes we get so much more dopamine because we’re knocking off tasks a lot faster and getting that chemical reward to the brain. So it can be really challenging to bring ourselves back to be like, “Oh, I have to work on the future of my business.” We don’t get the dopamine hit in the same way, so it’s so easy to lose track of.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, gosh. Especially when you factor in how just the impact social media has had on our brains, because they’re wired to just have you … It’s why they’re so addictive.

Diane Mueller:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

They know this about us. It doesn’t really keep you focused on where you need to go. As you were building your businesses, My Lyme Doc and My Libido Doc, was this something that you struggled through to figure this out on your own? I mean, how much trial and error was there around this and perhaps other challenges? We all have them as entrepreneurs.

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. The first business I did, which I’ve since sold, the first business I did, I sold. There’s always trials and error, but I feel like that was my big trial and error business, where I got it off the ground, working three part-time jobs. The first year, I call it my rice and bean here because that’s basically what I was eating, because I had so many debt collectors calling me. I didn’t know if my lights were going to get turned off. It was blood, sweat, tears. I had no idea what I was doing. I grew that to a seven-figure business. I sold it. That was pretty amazing, to take that level of growth, from literally, I can’t eat hardly anything, I have to live on rice, to that level of success.

One of the things I talk to female entrepreneurs about some is the three commitments. One of the first commitments I learned about throughout my own trials was what I call the commitment to space. One of the things that happened when I was getting things off the ground and I was working these part-time jobs to just stay afloat, there was some point where, when my business started building and taking off, I ran out of time. There was this math equation where I still needed those three businesses to really cover my overhead, but I was running out of time. I didn’t have time, but I didn’t have enough money. If I quit my jobs, I was going to have the time to really put on the business. If I kept my jobs, I would be okay more financially, but then I’d be in the position where I didn’t have time to work on my business, and it was going to be stalled.

The commitment to space is really born out of that, around there was a point where I just realized something has got to give, and I got to take a chance on myself. Now, I recommend everybody do that with calculations and thoughtfulness and planning and all of that. But that commitment to space to be like, “I’m going to go all in,” I was really, really close to being there, where it could actually sustain me. So then I quit my jobs, and I was running life at a slight deficit, which I very quickly, in about six weeks, all of a sudden was running no longer at a deficit, was able to be positive and pay myself. That really came from actually opening up and committing to having that space to say, “This is my thing, and I’m going to be all in.”

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful. I mean, you mentioned the planning around that, too, because life rarely, especially for entrepreneurs, goes according to plan. Sometimes even those best laid plans of how all the numbers are going to work don’t necessarily work out. I mean, did yours work to plan, or did you have surprises along the way?

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. My worked to plan. Some of that is just knowing the simple things that we know when we’re really learning entrepreneurship around price points and overhead and all that. How many more people do I really truly need? How many more clients do I really truly need to be able to make up for this? Once I actually did the math and realized … I don’t actually remember the numbers anymore, but realized it was not very many. It was not very many. So then it was really thinking through, “Well, where are clients coming from? Where’s the number one source of clients coming from? Okay. Well this is the number one source clients are coming from. How can I use my time to really triple down on that area because that’s where I’m getting the most clients?”

It still was a risk. There still was a level of maybe I would’ve needed to take out a bank loan. Maybe I would’ve needed to go back and get another job. There’s always that risk that things don’t go according to plan. But because I was calculated and figured out, like, “Oh, this is where I need to triple down on my time, this is where the large portion of my clients are coming from, so if I set myself up to triple down time on that, the odds are really stacked in my favor.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. You have the clarity and peace of mind. It’s very difficult to get anywhere where you don’t have a roadmap in your own mind about how you’re going to get there, because then you’re just wandering around in the fog. Having that clarity is really important. Space is the first of the three commitments. What’s the second one?

Diane Mueller:

The second one is truth. The truth is largely being honest with ourselves about where we are. The boxes exercise is an example of truth, or what we were talking about earlier around being on our email too much as the example of truth. Truth is actually being able to look at that thing in the eye and say, “Oh, crap. Well, it hurts my ego to admit that I’m doing that. It hurts my ego maybe to admit that maybe I’m not as good at one of these boxes. I stink at one of these boxes.” That’s not very good for the ego. It’s like, “No, that email thing can’t be affecting me that much. Actually, I check out a hundred times a day.” So being able to look at these things for what they are and actually not worry about them hurting our ego and just being honest with ourselves, that’s [inaudible 00:18:38]-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Not being in shame about it. It doesn’t say anything bad about you. It’s just understanding where you are. I saw a LinkedIn post that I think Sir Richard Branson put in there the other day, where it showed a lineup of animals, like an elephant, an ape, a fish, all these different types of animals, and with somebody saying, “Now, there’s only one test for this. How well do you all do climbing up the tree?”

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Everybody has different strengths or weaknesses. So being able to understand the truth of what is your genius superpower, what’s your zone of excellence, where are you okay, competent, but someone could be better, and what’s your zone of suck?

Diane Mueller:

Yes. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

That honesty without shame or judgment, that’s a big personal growth step for just about everybody.

Diane Mueller:

It is. It is. Every time, even in my own personal life, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m totally being honest with myself.” Then it’s a punch in the face where I’m like, “Ah. Okay. Well, maybe I didn’t see that as much as I thought I did.” It’s a area where I think that’s the idea of the commitment. The idea is it’s a lifetime journey. It’s not like we say, “Oh, we’re just going to see this, and it’s going to be here all the time.” It’s like we’re going to keep coming back to the question of what am I not being honest with myself about, what am I not wanting to see, and continuing to explore that, like you said, without judgment, without shame, without guilt, with kindness and compassion, but also with open eyes.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. Okay. What’s the third?

Diane Mueller:

The third is time. From a time perspective, it’s somewhat of what we’ve talked about, around what does time look like, block timing, how to be efficient. But also wrapped up in time is time not just in and on our business, but how to set up our life and how to set up our time in a way where we are also committed to ourselves. Something I love to talk to the women about that I work with in the time realm is also the commitment with setting aside time for pleasure. That’s one of the unique things that I really talk about in my business coaching school, is really this idea around pleasure, because pleasure is a way of regulating everything else. When we do pleasurable things and we do certain things that actually raise oxytocin, the pleasure hormone levels, we actually see hormones get balanced. We see weight regulates. We see we sleep better. We see that cortisol, the stress hormone, regulates. This is stuff that there’s medical literature about these sorts of things I’m talking about.

What winds up happening when we actually drop and we commit to time, not just for our business on and in, but also to ourselves for pleasure, is it actually changes the way our neurological system processes things. If we’re having a hard time making decisions and there’s a level of, like, “I don’t know what to do, I’m not clear, all these different paths of these choices, they all have pros and cons, I can’t see it,” stepping away and having time, at least on a weekly basis, I like to encourage people even on a daily basis. I understand that that gets sometimes hard, but at least on a weekly basis, to really have time to sink into pure pleasure is where we are allowing our brain to actually work in a different way. When we do that, we can have different ideas and creative solutions to spontaneously arise as a benefit from actually stepping away and re-regulating our hormones and our stress and taking a moment for joy.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, vital. Vital. I think very few women actually do that because it’s almost like you are the last in a long line because we tend to put everyone else ahead of ourselves. You can easily get into a situation where you’re working for your team. You’re working for your kids, your partner, your this, your that. You got everything, and then, at the end of the day, maybe there is a little bit of time left for you. Maybe, maybe not, when you have a business. So it really comes down to actually prioritizing that, even to the point of putting it in your calendar if you have to.

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. Exactly. The reason I like talking about some of the medical component is similar to the boxes exercise, where, as you said, it’s so easy as women to fall into this. We are last. We do things for so many other people, and then there’s nothing left for us. So just like with the boxes exercise, where there’s that awareness of, like, “Wow, I have more than a hundred boxes of things I do on a daily basis,” it’s awakening to the whole body and the whole brain around, “I can’t continue in this fashion.” Similar with pleasure. I find that it’s so impactful as a way of getting the brain to work better, of helping people stay out of overwhelm and more balance, and to solve things in a more creative way. It trickles down into every area of life.

When we actually understand things that are motivating to us, typically as women, such as helping our stress response, helping maintain proper body weight, helping us sleep deeper, these sorts of things, we actually realize that taking time for that is directly related to all of those things, sometimes it can help with that motivation around like, “Oh, okay. I want all of these things. These things are all important to me. So I need to find ways of getting this in because that’s how I’m going to get these other things I want.”

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. Diane, I mean, the fact that you’re a doctor and you bring all this medical understanding, actually, to entrepreneurship is really intriguing and interesting to me because you became an entrepreneur through your own medical challenge as well. You struggled with Lyme. I’m sure that is one of the major reasons why you have a business called My Lyme Doc. Tell me what you went through. You also wrote a book about it. Tell me how you walked through that and how it influenced your career and your entrepreneurship.

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. Thank you. It was quite the journey. I started out, really, when I was young. I had a lot of just basic chronic constipation that was not able to be figured out by conventional medicine. I just had a label of IBS put on me. It was just like, “Take some laxatives. You’ll be fine.” So it started out with that, which was a little bit concerning to me because I just had this innate feeling on the body, that if something was out of balance chronically like that, that was my body talking. That was part of how I ended up going to naturopathic medical school. I was looking for a different way.

What ended up happening in school, while I was looking for a different way of helping my own symptoms and my own curiosity about body, I’ve always been a scientist at heart, even from a young girl’s age, but what happened in school was I started getting crazy symptoms. I started having memory loss where I would leave the house for very short walk. Around that time, I had such fibromyalgia and pain and chronic fatigue syndrome that walks were literally this five-minute thing around the block, where I would drag myself all five minutes. But during that time, I could actually leave my house and start walking around the block and forget where I lived. It would come in these episodes. They would come like waves. I would get really dissociated. I would have visual changes. I would just be confused. The way I describe it is I think this was probably only lasting seconds, but it could feel like minutes. It felt so scary to just have these waves of like, “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t see straight.” So I would get these episodes.

Then I was having situations where the pain was so bad that on certain days I wouldn’t be able to walk. I had some instances where I would get stuck on the toilet. My pain was so bad I couldn’t actually clench my muscles to get off of the toilet, which was crazy embarrassing, but that was the story. Some days, where I’d have such crazy feeling in my extremities, where I couldn’t drive because I couldn’t feel the steering wheel. Things like that. When I was in medical school, it was really easy for it to just get brushed off as medical school syndrome. Then, when I graduated and my friends were getting better from their fatigue and I was getting worse, that’s when I really knew, “This is not just up until 3:00 in the morning drinking triple shots of espresso to study for the exam and fatigue from that.” It was really coming from a place of chronic illness. That’s when I found Lyme disease and lots of toxins and other microorganisms besides Borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme. That’s what got me into the Lyme world.

Melinda Wittstock:

It is so interesting to me how many entrepreneurs find their purpose through a struggle. At the time, it must have felt it was happening to you. Now, do you feel that that happened for you so you can help so many other people, not only as a thought leader in this area and as an expert, as a doctor, but also as an entrepreneur?

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. I mean, I feel that way with all of my businesses. I struggled with Lyme in the middle of all of that. I was struggling. I’ve gone through periods of really struggling with libido throughout my life. Then, like I said, starting the business and living on rice and beans and having 13 debt collectors calling me and not knowing if my lights were going to turn off. All of those types of things, that’s really what is the foundation of all of these businesses, really, is how I learned to overcome these.

As a scientist and researcher, the biggest thing for me with all of these things is going through these things really has set me in crazy research mode around, well, what are all the studies that have come out? Who are the other experts I can learn from? I’m just a lifelong learner. I think that’s part of my passion, is really learning and assimilating and trying to assimilate things for people in a way that’s really distilled down to the most important parts so they can incorporate it into their lives without having to go through the same level of struggle, hopefully, that I have gone through.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, that’s just beautiful. I want to make sure that people know how to find you and work with you. Perhaps they’ve struggled with mold or Lyme, or they have a friend or a relative in that situation, or the libido issue, you have, with My Libido Doc, a very vibrant community there. But also, how to get the best of your advice at Femme Meets fortune. What’s the best way?

Diane Mueller:

Yeah. I mean, the easiest way to find links to all of that is if you just go to my personal website, drdianemueller.com. You’ll see a link to all three of those different businesses that I offer. The way I onboard people through each of those businesses is slightly different. Really, if you’re interested in any of that, you can just go to drdianemueller.com. You can find links to the various types of things we’re talking about. Whether it’s libido, whether it’s Lyme, whether it’s business coaching, all of that is on there for you. That’s a one-stop shot to all of my offerings.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting your wings on with us today and sharing your inspiring journey.

Diane Mueller:

Thank you. Thank you, Melinda. It’s been a pleasure.