338 MINISODE Marina Barayeva: It’s Not Personal

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 the power of just doing it… getting out of our own way, stopping all that perfectionism and procrastination. And why to succeed as entrepreneurs we simply must embrace failure as part of the process and not take it personally.

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

Marina Barayeva.

Marina is an international portrait photographer based in Beijing, China. She is also a host of the popular podcast Marketing for Creatives where she brings the experts and other creatives to share their experience in business and marketing.

As a creative marketer, she is always busy with innovative projects. She organized and hosted an online conference Lady-Photographer, a fashion show called ‘New Year Queen’ and was a part of the Art Project for Beijing Design Week.

Marina helps people to do what they love and grow it as a business by providing them with a blueprint to grow their influence.

Marina will be here with her advice in just a moment and first I have a question for you.

And now to the inspiring Marina Barayeva who shares her advice on how to beat fear of failure and the procrastination and perfectionism that are its symptoms.

Melinda Wittstock:        Marina, welcome to Wings.

Marina Barayeva:            Hi, Melinda. How are you today?

Melinda Wittstock:         I’m doing great, and I’m curious what’s inspiring you right now in your business and in your life?

Marina Barayeva:            I like to look at other people’s life and other business stories, how people made it to where they are, and it doesn’t relate only for business, but maybe some life experience or the relationship or the travel life, like anything. When I look at this, I feel like what I would like to learn from this person, what I would like to apply to my life or my business. It’s very practical for me.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, that’s great. You know, they say that if you’re the smartest person in the room, I mean you can only get dumber, so it’s always good to be around people and learn from people, right? I always like to tell people, figure out who’s doing what you want to do best and then figure out how to hang around with them and ask them lots of questions. They’re usually kind of flattered by it. So, that’s a really great way to go. So we all have challenges in our businesses, right? What are some of yours right now?

Marina Barayeva:            For me right now is as an entrepreneur is just structure more my daily routine and be more focused on what I’m doing. So I started a little morning routine, which really helped me a lot recently. Then I asked myself what’s my top goal for today? My big goal, my big vision, my big project, which one I’m working on today. Then the next step, why am working on this project? Why it’s important to me, and then the third one, what the little step I can take today to get closer to this big project.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. And so you have a number of solutions to a challenge, which is what, like overwhelmed trying to do too much or, ’cause yeah, you were awesome with the solution and the [crosstalk] challenge was what?

Marina Barayeva:            The challenge was, as we do a lot of things and we often get so much distracted by small steps, small actions that we take in our businesses. That-

Melinda Wittstock:         The busy work? Yeah, the busy work.

Marina Barayeva:            Then sometimes you just lose the meaning like why you do, what do you. And you feel yourself like, okay, I work a lot, I work hard and you don’t see much results and like why am I doing this?

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, that’s-

Marina Barayeva:            What was the original goal.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. It’s so important to check in with yourself and stay really, really focused. I have all kinds of processes and procedures that I do to make sure that I’m on track like that, like Sunday mornings really thinking about the week and my intention. What would make this week, really change the game. ‘Cause otherwise, you get on what I call a task treadmill and you keep running faster and faster and faster and faster, but you’re not really getting anywhere.

Marina Barayeva:            Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:         We see this so often in business and it’s tragic. So you’d like, yes, staying on the main point. What’s going to be the thing that moves the needle most for you? So what a great segue into our advice segment. So I always ask all our Minisode guests to share your top three pieces of advice for women in business and entrepreneurs. If you could do it all over again, what would be the top three pieces of advice that you would share with yourself?

Marina Barayeva:            Well number one I would give … I would tell myself if you want to do something, start today, do not procrastinate because whatever you plan it will change, it will something new come up. And then it was funny when one of my first startups, I wanted to create my online course, my bedtime CD or DVD program, and I was working on it. I was thinking about it for several months and then I was working on it for three months and I’m like I need to make it good. It’s my first product and I was ready to launch it. I can talk to people and one week before my launch, another guy launched, almost the same course. [crosstalk] of the same information. After that I promised myself I’m not going to wait for so long time. If I want to do something I need to start.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right, because everybody has the same idea around the same time. It’s really funny because I launched a second podcast just only not so long ago and I really did rush into it and it was great. It’s about couple preneurs. Men and women or it could be women and women and men and men who are romantically involved and also in business together or both entrepreneurs. And it was really funny, I just put it out there. It had a lot of traction before I even did it. So I did it right away, and then all of a sudden I’ve noticed there’s a whole bunch of other people who have the same idea. But I was ahead of them because I didn’t wait. So like I learned that lesson too. Okay. So what’s number two?

Marina Barayeva:            Number two goes again, the procrastination, perfectionism and anxiety. What stops you from doing something? It’s always happen when you have a fear of failure. When you are afraid to make mistakes. When you afraid to … that things will not work. Don’t let this thing stops you, because when you think, like when you start … when you feel that you’re procrastinating, you want to do this and you’re like, maybe it’s not the right time, or I’m maybe, I need to make it perfect like I’ve done that time. It means that you’re just afraid to fail.

Marina Barayeva:            And often you afraid to fail, not just for yourself or something will not work, but because someone close to you may think that maybe you are not worth this. Maybe you’re not good enough, maybe they will laugh with human being. They will judge you. Maybe something else. Think about who’s that person who opinions matter for you so much that you worry about that because for yourself you’re good. You might have said that you cannot sing, but you can sing in the shower and you don’t care about this. But you would care, maybe your neighbor will listen to you, right?

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. Yeah. No, gosh, that’s so true. Okay, so what’s number three?

Marina Barayeva:            And the third one collaborate with other people. My favorite abbreviation is together each achieves more. It’s a team. One, you can do some things by yourself. But when you work with other people, you have two brains, three brains, more smart people. And when you support each other first it’s like it’s good to have support from the side, but it also practically you help other people to grow their businesses. They help you to grow your businesses, exchanging audiences, come up with new events, projects you help market each other businesses.

Marina Barayeva:            So you grow together much, much faster than if you would do it by yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh my goodness. This is so, so true. So, Marina, how can people find you and work with you?

Marina Barayeva:            Well, you can find me at Marinabarayeva.com and my social media is all Marina Barayeva. I’m more active on Instagram, so feel free to reach me out over there, and if you would like to, grow in your business, grow your personal brand, your authority, you can go to Marinabarayeva.com/influencer and take a quick quiz. As a result, you get … where you are now in the business and what is your next step to grow your authority.

Melinda Wittstock:         Marina, this is so important because we all have to figure out a way how to be differentiated influencers in a really noisy market, whether we’re entrepreneurs and CEOs or whether we’re just freelancers or even if we’re working within a corporation, being noticed is everything.

Melinda Wittstock:         Thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Marina Barayeva:            Thank you so much Melinda, it was a privilege to serve your audience today.