815 Tracy Yates:

Tracy Yates:

You can’t have an energy that exudes complete confidence if you are underneath feeling like you can’t do it, you’re not good enough, you may fail, you may look bad. That is incongruent, right? You can’t fake energy. You can fake your words, you can write a great script and present on stage and say the right thing, but the world operates on energy. People respond to energy. They may not know consciously, that’s what they’re responding to, but that’s how it works. So we can’t get there through mindset work, because you haven’t addressed your energy field, you haven’t addressed all the residue essentially, from these stories that we tell ourselves and our subconscious that sit in our body.

Most people think entrepreneurial success is all about putting in the hard work, grinding to hit the next milestone, and increasingly getting into the right mindset to achieve your dreams. Entrepreneur Tracy Yates says all that conscious striving doesn’t break the inner glass ceiling we all have. So today we talk about what she calls the Ambition Paradox, and why our success depends on our energy, that is who we’re being, rather than what we’re doing.

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 AI-powered 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 who built and sold an 8-figure business and took what she learned along the way to now help women overcome what she calls the Ambition Paradox.

Tracy Yates is known for her lighting-speed transformations that alchemize inner barriers to higher levels of success, heal relationships with toxic overachieving and reveal unprecedented new paths and potential forward in business and personal achievements for many of today’s innovative and influential leaders.

Tracy will be here in a moment, and first,

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Ever feel like you’re running in place on a task treadmill… faster and faster while you juggle more and more balls, desperate not to let any of them drop. It’s exhausting you. It’s burning you out. And you think there is something wrong with you because you’re doing everything you can and still it’s so hard to grow your business.

Girlfriend, it doesn’t have to be that way.

It may seem like a paradox, because, well, it is. Fact is, the more we can detach from the hustle, let go of all the ‘how’s’ and ‘should’s’, and focus on who we are being rather than what we are doing, the swifter success comes to us.

Tracy Yates calls it the Ambition Paradox, and in two decades as an entrepreneur building 3 businesses and one into an 8-figure agency called Boost Marketing she sold in 2019, she says she learned the hard way that she could achieve more by doing less. More specifically, she had to break what she calls her “inner glass ceiling” and shift her energy to succeed.

These days, Tracy is a sought-after Transformational Guide and Advisor to visionary entrepreneurs and impact-driven leaders who attain unprecedented new heights in business and within themselves.  She’s known as the secret weapon to high achievers who become high receivers by amplifying their impact and income through their unique work in the world. Her approach is at the intersection of human potential, energetics, personal transformation, and business growth.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Tracy Yates and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Tracy, welcome to Wings.

Tracy Yates:

Hi, Melinda. Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s get right into the ambition paradox. What do you mean by an ambition paradox, and how is it a barrier to our success? Particularly as female founders and entrepreneurs?

Tracy Yates:

Yeah, well, as entrepreneurs, right, we’re a special breed. It requires extreme resilience, unwavering, unapologetic confidence and conviction in our vision. We have to take risks and we juggle everything. And through this process, we become so overly focused on growing, or scaling, or reaching our next business milestone. And we do that because we’ve been taught that we need to push harder, that we need to really force our way, and do whatever it takes to reach our next goal. And what we don’t realize is through that process, we’re actually unknowingly hindering where we want to go. And I know that feels counterintuitive, but when we become so fixated on what needs to happen, how to do it as fast as we can, how we can best accomplish it through that process, we’ve disconnected from our biggest and most powerful asset, which is ourselves.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s a paradox, isn’t it? Because the things that entrepreneurship requires of you, you have this vision, this north star, you got to pivot a lot along the way. You’re constantly kind of failing and learning from the failure, and moving on and all that kind of stuff. But you’re sort of saying that, that disconnects us from ourselves. So it’s a tricky one to balance.

Tracy Yates:

Well, it is. And when you think about really what it takes to succeed in entrepreneurship, 80% of that comes from within. If we’re talking about resilience, if we’re talking about unwavering vision, if we’re talking about taking risks, if we’re talking about making hard and big decisions, none of that has to do with what’s happening outside of us.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Yeah. So it’s a mindset issue, in other words.

Tracy Yates:

It’s a mindset issue. But I think with mindset though, and listen, mindset is a great tool, but what’s happening is all of these, our need to do these things are really driven from a much deeper place, which lives in our subconscious, and it disregulates our nervous system. And all of these things also live in our energy field. So we’re not even paying attention to these things. All we’re thinking about is how do I get there? What can I do outside of me to control, or make my result happen? And mindset is really thinking about and trying to manage our conscious thoughts, things that we are aware of. But what I am saying is it’s really what we’re not seeing and what we’re not aware of that’s driving all of this.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, completely. It’s sort of the iceberg.

Tracy Yates:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because why, if we get really deep about it, what makes us be an entrepreneur to begin with? What are we trying to prove?

Melinda Wittstock:

And what is actually driving us? You built and scaled an eight figure marketing agency, you’ve sold it. That couldn’t have been easy. So along that way, what were you learning about your own subconscious motivations? What was coming from within and what was external?

Tracy Yates:

Well, in the beginning I didn’t realize it, right? And when I was starting to get my business off the ground, I did what everybody else does. I call it CEO fatigue. We’re just what we just talked about, trying to create results, doing whatever we can. But when I got to a certain place in my business and I felt I was at a plateau and I realized that none of the pushing harder, or trying to do more strategies, or adding another tactic was really getting me sort of over the hump. And so with my own really personal curiosity and interest in how we think, why we do the things that we do, I really started to dive deep into the human psyche and what is this all about? And I realized that I had trauma. I was deathly afraid of failing. I was trying to prove my worth because underneath I was not as confident in myself. And those are hard things for people to see, and for ourselves. And the people that I work with, these are seasoned entrepreneurs, and on the outside they look like they have everything together and everything going for them. But on the inside, that’s not their reality.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So you end up in this constant kind of striving, of getting things done, hitting milestones, doing all the things, and you could be succeeding, but only to a point. Is there sort of a plateau that, that kind of energy only gets you so far?

Tracy Yates:

It does. I mean, I call this our invisible inner ceiling because we can never outperform our self-identity. And what I mean by that is how we see ourself, what we believe is possible for us. And it’s like walking through our business with blinders on. And even if we are visioning and brainstorming, I have found that every single entrepreneur that I’ve talked to, that I’ve worked with, are not thinking big enough because they can’t imagine it’s possible or that they can achieve it.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m a big believer in visualization. And what’s been interesting on my journey is when you try and visualize something big, but you immediately get some sort of-

Tracy Yates:

Resistance.

Melinda Wittstock:

… Resistance to that internally where you just can’t even see it and-

Tracy Yates:

You can’t see it, it’s invisible in our blind spots. And I think that’s why it’s called a blind spot for a reason. And even if you are someone who is into mindfulness and mindset, which again, I’m not saying in this conversation that those aren’t important tools or important ways of living, but they don’t get you to the real place where you’re limiting yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:

So this reminds me of something because back in 2019, I was doing these high ticket retreats for successful female founders. And in the marketing and in the conversations I was having, it was all about how can we all play a bigger game? And I started to notice something really interesting. Because whenever I said ‘play bigger’, there was a sort of moment almost of fear in the eyes of every woman I talked to, whether she had a seven figure or eight figure business, there was this barrier that I came to see and I thought, what is going on there? Why are we so fearful of playing a bigger game? And my whole thing was, why aren’t more women taking big moonshots? How many women do you know that set out to say, “Hey, I’m creating a billion-dollar business.” And a lot of it is just the lack of ability to visualize it on one hand. And on the other hand, I started to understand that it was also like, “Oh my God, I’m already doing so much. I’m going to have to do so do so much more to get there.” And I began to see that that was a fallacy too, because it’s not necessarily about the doing that would get you to that place.

Tracy Yates:

And that’s the point, right? Exactly. You hit it on the nail because when you have gotten to that place, my clients too are in the seven and they want to go to eight, nine, they want to maybe scale and exit, and they’re so depleted, and exhausted, and burnt out. The thought of pushing harder it’s like their brains, they’re like, “I can’t do it.” And I get that I couldn’t do it either, which really led me into this work and doing it myself just to scale my agency to eight figures and sell it. And it wasn’t by doing more, it was about who I was being. And being oftentimes can be a complicated subject to really wrap your head around. But the best way I describe being is it’s not a… You move from the thought focused and analytical thinking about how you’re going to accomplish something. And you actually know through who you are, through your energy, through, you know you absolutely know in every ounce and cell in your body that anything and everything is possible if you show up in your full power and that’s not doing more.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so let’s get into this, because a lot of people, what do you mean, who am I being? And if you go way back to way the kind of father of law of attraction or law of assumption, Neville Goddard. His whole thing was just change your story. Just start being who you would be being if you were running a billion-dollar business. And that’s, I think, hard for women because you can’t quite imagine. So what would that look like? I don’t even know.

Tracy Yates:

Absolutely. And it’s part of that is the being, right? We can talk about this a little bit and get a little deeper, is being is all about energy, in my opinion. And so you can’t have an energy that exudes complete confidence if you are underneath feeling like you can’t do it, you’re not good enough, you may fail, you may look bad. That is incongruent, right? You can’t fake energy. You can fake your words, you can write a great script and present on stage and say the right thing, but the world operates on energy. People respond to energy. They may not know consciously, that’s what they’re responding to, but that’s how it works. So that’s what I’m saying, we can’t get there through mindset work, because you haven’t addressed your energy field, you haven’t addressed all the residue essentially, from these stories that we tell ourselves and our subconscious that sit in our body, and I see it over and over again. And so to me, being is becoming this version and acting as this version and making decisions from this version of you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Okay. So talk to me practically about how you take your clients through this transformation. Get them into, I guess just for, I don’t know, the right energy or their actual energy once you get rid of all these stories, and fears, and limitations and such.

Tracy Yates:

Well, when we think about energy, I think that the best way to maybe start is a lot of us don’t maybe understand energy. And we may think it’s woo-woo. We may think, oh, it’s just how we think. Or we show up and we’re positive that’s a good energy, or we’re sad that’s not a good energy. And partially that is true, but we have an energy system, it’s in our body and it’s in a field around us. And so if we are holding these subconscious thoughts, which by the way, this is science, this is nothing to do with woo, 95% of our thoughts and actions are driven by our subconscious stories, 95%.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow.

Tracy Yates:

That’s a pretty large number, pretty large percent of our day. And we have up to 60,000 thoughts a day. And those are, again, 95% of them are driven by our subconscious.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you don’t even know that you’re acting or just even the decisions you’re making, or how you’re showing up could be completely counter to your actual conscious intention?

Tracy Yates:

It happens all the time. So you asked me, how do I do this? So there is first, right? It’s diving into the subconscious, but going to really the core. It’s not a therapy where you know you go to talk therapy or cognitive processing and you go back to your parents and talk about how that impacted you. If you go to the core, the seed if you will, what created this, you can actually dissolve and transmute it immediately through your body and also through your energy field.

So that’s the kind of work that I’m doing and the kind of work I’m interested in. Because if we take ourselves on a long healing journey, that can take a really long time. And my approach is, let’s go to the origin, let’s go to the seed, let’s get to the real problem, which for most people is fear. Fear of failure, fear of not being enough, fear of looking silly, fear of failing. So we have these fears, and then we don’t believe it’s possible. We don’t believe it’s possible to achieve all these great things in our lives and really have everything, and we’re talking about business here, but all of these also have a ripple effect into your personal life, in your relationships, in how you parent, the joy that you have, the peace that you have. This is really the crux of everything. And it’s you. If you look at a wheel of life, you are at the center. So when we really dive into what’s really driving you and driving your thoughts, we can get rid of those permanently, and shift immediately into a completely new perspective. And when you’re operating from this, let’s call it an expanded perspective, everything opens up. My clients, they’re so mired in how they’re doing things. They don’t even realize that there’s a completely maybe expanded or new way to do things that would double their revenue. They don’t think about additional revenue streams that may be very easy and obvious to them, and they can create extraordinary results from that place if you let go.

Melinda Wittstock:

So let go is an interesting concept. Talk to me a little bit more about letting go, because we do get attached often to the how.

Tracy Yates:

Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

Opposed to the what, or the why, or just the end result. So there’s a certain amount of surrender required here, which is hard for people.

Tracy Yates:

Yes. But I think when we think about surrender are what our minds go to is like, oh, I’m completely taking my hands off the wheel, and it’s this black and sort of white way of how our mind processes things. But when we’re saying surrender, we’re just saying, “Hey, maybe you can take your foot off the gas a little bit about pushing so hard. Maybe you can pull back a little bit about forcing something to happen. Maybe you can pull back on trying to control the outcome that you’re trying to achieve.” Because we can’t control anything. And when we see it from that perspective, letting go to me in that way is really more of like let’s create some space, let’s create more… We’ll create some room for all these new opportunities and potential to actually present themselves to you. And it happens all the time.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s just like you reach these plateaus even if you’re on a conscious journey. So let me just frame a question here.

Tracy Yates:

Sure.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Tracy, this is really captivating me because on my own entrepreneurial journey, it has been one of escalating conscious awareness.

Tracy Yates:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Learning to be in the present moment, wrestling with these concepts of what does it mean to let go? What does it mean to be present in the here and now? Be okay with not having to control everything, releasing old stories or rewriting them, energy work, all these sorts of things. And I find this is an ongoing process because there’s always kind of a new plateau.

Tracy Yates:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

No matter how conscious, it’s such a journey.

Tracy Yates:

Yes, Melinda and I get it. And listen, none of us are perfect. And I think it’s something really important to mention here about what we’re talking about. Because when we think about business, it’s all about getting to the end game, to getting to the end result. It’s like, okay, we get here, cool, we made it, and then what’s the next thing? And if we think about this as a journey, what happens is, you will reach a plateau, but the plateau is the signal to you. There’s something else going on that you haven’t gotten to yet. And to look there. And when we become, and you said you’re on a conscious journey, and basically that’s what we’re talking about here, right? It’s really, Albert Einstein has a great quote. He said, “You can’t solve the problems from the same consciousness that create it.” But when you get to this level of awareness, you then have the ability to say, “Okay, wait a minute, something’s here.” Versus, “I have no idea what’s here.” And then you can generally sort of find it yourself because you have the awareness around it. Does that make sense?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it does. And I think one of the most interesting things that happens with entrepreneurs, so say you’ve set your sights on a certain milestone or achieving something, but you can’t control all the different things that are going to get you there. And you find yourself blocked. Like say, you are anticipating a funding round and it’s delayed, or you were really attached to signing a particular contract, but it’s not aligning.

Tracy Yates:

Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

And at those moments when you’re blocked, what’s your best advice for what’s actually going on there? Because it could be our energy that’s blocking it, or it could be that it’s actually the wrong thing for your business, and the universe is sort of trying to help you out a little bit. What’s actually going on there? What’s you? What’s them? You know what I mean?

Tracy Yates:

I do. I’m laughing because it happens to all of us. And so it can be a little bit of both. Generally, I find that if there is something that you are so passionate about and really trying to make happen, and you’re not getting any movement, it probably means you’re so attached to it that you’re actually blocking it through your own energy. That’s number one.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s such a paradox. That’s so hard.

Tracy Yates:

Paradox.

Melinda Wittstock:

The analytic mind just blows up at that, right?

Tracy Yates:

Totally. I mean, it’s so true. And I mean, that’s why I think I call it ambition paradox, because we’ve all been operating this certain way and so ingrained to believe that this is the only way that something can happen where we’ve got an entire set of operating systems, essentially we’re all designed as beings, human beings the same way. And so none of this is woo-woo. This is actually quantum physics, essentially.

Melinda Wittstock:

So through the process though, sort of practically, okay, so you find yourself, you’re attached to this outcome, you can only conceive that it’s going to happen a certain way, your energy as a result is blocking it. What do you do? Okay, that applies to sort of being the doing. What do you do? Or how do you start being maybe is a better way to, in this context of the conversation at that point?

Tracy Yates:

Yeah. So there’s some really practical ways. So the first one is, like I said, if you’re not getting any movement, there’s a difference between reaching your goal and being stagnant. So when we think about stagnancy where there’s no momentum, there’s no movement. So what I would say is step away, literally move. Whether that’s walking, whether that’s working out, whether that’s surfing, whatever you do that kind of brings you back into yourself and your center. And create some space, let go of the analytical thinking of how do I accomplish this? And let the answer pop in. And it will, if you let go of the control, the answer will pop in.

I was just at a conference this week, and a woman who is one of the most well-known women in Wall Street, and she was talking about how she was trying to get funding for her new venture, and she went through all the other traditional channels. She spoke to VC, she, and she’s very connected. So I mean, she’s somebody who you would think that would be very easy to go through that process. And she kept bumping up against the wall. Nothing was happening. It was a no, after a no, after a no. And then she realized there’s got to be a different way, but she didn’t know what it was. And so she literally, this random woman reached out to her and she set up a conversation. I’m fast forwarding the story because it’s a long story, but she set up a conversation with her, and this woman was like, listen, I want to help you, and I have X, Y, and Z. And so they went about their funding in a totally different way, and she raised more than she was even trying to get through the traditional VC route.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it was literally just by opening herself up to just a different alternative, right?

Tracy Yates:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

There are so many stories like this, I think often about, say the founder of Evernote. Do you remember Evernote?

Tracy Yates:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So that guy couldn’t get funding. He was going to shut his business down. The very next day, he had hundreds of employees. He was at, it was 3:00 in the morning. The customer called him out of the blue, not being aware of the time zone difference. He took the call and this customer was like, “I just want to say how much I love Evernote. It’s so amazing. Is there anything I can do to help? I just love you guys.” And founder says, “Well, hey, it’s really sad. I got to shut it down in the morning.” And that customer says, “Well, would a check for $500,000 help you?”

Tracy Yates:

Right. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Completely out of the blue. It’s not something that you could predict, or strive for, or anything. It was just kind of a weird kind of providence. But I mean, that guy must have just completely surrendered in that moment.

Tracy Yates:

It’s exactly what he did. That’s a perfect example. He was like, all right, this isn’t working. I’m going to close down my company. He let go.

Melinda Wittstock:

And then literally within, an hour.

Tracy Yates:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And it’s interesting because I have this perspective of a serial entrepreneur, in this case technology, where you are depending on investors to be able to grow your business because there’s so much cost ahead of revenue. And in my case, we’ve had a committed funding round now for a very long time that just hasn’t materialized, and it’s just been delayed, we have proof of funds, but the capital’s not flowing. I have a whole team saying, “Hey, so when’s the money coming?” “Well, it is, but I just don’t know when.” All that. And you can get very, very stuck that that’s the only way it can happen.

Tracy Yates:

Exactly. Exactly.

Tracy Yates:

That’s so awesome because I can’t wait to see if you let go, what happens? You’ll have to let me know.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s so interesting. And so I’ve been literally really, I’ve been immersed in these themes for some weeks now in terms of that. And it is kind of a paradox because you do come to… Once you accept that it is your energy, and then you’re like, “Okay, so what is it that I have to…” You become this detective.

Tracy Yates:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

What is it, man? What do I have to clear? And then your analytic mind goes into the doing. Okay, so I’m going to have my list of… Right?

Tracy Yates:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And it’s such a hornet’s nest.

Tracy Yates:

It is. And I think one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for us to even wrap our heads around this, that this is a possibility, is that we’re afraid. We’re afraid to let go, because we’ve worked so hard or we’re so attached to how this is going to come to fruition. And it’s scary. I’m not saying this is easy.

I don’t think any of this is easy, but what I am saying is when you get it, when it clicks, an entire new world opens up to you. It’s exactly what I did for my business. It’s exactly what my clients do. And we’re not only creating these new results in our business, but it creates this level of peace and joy in our life that we all want, and it has a ripple effect into everything that we do. And I think that’s the piece. If we can get out of our own way, have the courage to get out of our own way, and maybe just even explore a little bit, just try it with something small where it’s not huge stakes you’re talking about are on the line. You can start there and just watch what happens.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I think it becomes complicated when you feel a responsibility for so many people, right?

Tracy Yates:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it’s not just about you, it’s you, it’s your family, it’s your kind of team family, it’s all of that. And that can become such a significant weight, which is not going to be great for your energy. So how do you balance that? Just that sense of responsibility?

Tracy Yates:

When we’re walking, yes, there is a responsibility. Of course, if you’re leading the charge, it is on you. But when you fully know yourself and you know, not believe, right? There’s difference here. Belief is in the thinking and the thought form, knowing is in your soul, let’s say, in your cellular system. Does that make sense? The difference?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes.

Tracy Yates:

So if you know, rather than believe that you know that listen, it is going to work out. Something is going to come. Maybe it’s not going to be how I thought it was going to be, but it’s going to be something, and it’s going to be potentially even better. That responsibility, that level of responsibility completely shifts. And if we as leaders lead from that space, our teams then start leading from that space too. And I have seen crazy, crazy ideas and opportunities arise because everyone’s allowing that to happen, versus I’ve got to make it happen this way.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly, I’m just on the kind of knife edge of this exact thing right now. So Tracy, you mentioned that you work with a lot of entrepreneurs that are kind of approaching or at seven figures, or striving to eight figures, or that kind of stuff. Tell me specifically how you work with them to help them through this process, and what are some of the results that you actually see happening as a result?

Tracy Yates:

So the process is I do have a framework, and the framework really is a holistic approach. So instead of addressing the symptoms, what I like to call. So those can be overwhelm, stuck, frustrated, burnt out, depleted, we all know those symptoms pretty well as an entrepreneur. So instead of really addressing it from a symptom perspective, I go to the core and I look at it holistically. Because we are an interconnected system. We’re not just our minds. I think we can all agree we’re more than just our minds. We’re physical beings, we’re energetic beings, we’re emotional, we’re spiritual. And so if you look at the core and how it’s all connected, that’s what I mean by holistic approach.

So if you take this holistic looking at the interconnectedness of all that you are and get to the core, what’s really driving this, which generally like we’ve talked about, is this subconscious or unconscious, oftentimes limitation. And then you work that through your system. So through your body, through your nervous system, through your energy field, then you really become someone who knows everything is possible and anything is achievable. And you allow yourself to come up with these new opportunities and possibilities in business. So to get specific on what that looks like, one of my clients, she has an agency, a creative agency. She serves wellness and beauty brands. And she had been doing the traditional agency model for, I don’t know, a decade I think. And she wanted to move and scale her business. And so we started with her, what was really going on with her? Why was she not getting past this seven figure plateau? No matter her willpower, or her strategy, or the positive thinking. And once we eliminated all of that, she had a new lens. And so we created a completely different agency model for her that she had never thought about. And she felt confident to step into that because it didn’t require her to take on a ton more work. And she 2Xed her revenue in a matter of months. But that model, she wasn’t even thinking in those terms.

And I had another client who is a very successful business coach. She had been doing sort of the traditional way of business coaching, mentoring 101, and she had some programs and she did the retreats, that traditional model. But when we got into all her stuff, her unconscious limitations about what was holding her back, actually, she created a magazine for entrepreneurs, and we designed it to have a subscription revenue to have advertising revenue. She then also started a agency, a full service agency to serve entrepreneurs because she was more than a business coach. She was a creative, she is a master at brand strategy. She’s been doing this for two decades, but that never crossed her mind because she thought of herself as a business coach and was looking at what everyone else was doing.

Melinda Wittstock:

So we can easily fall into this trap of doing it the way we quote/unquote should do it, because that’s how other people have done it. When in fact, entrepreneurship at the end of the day, it’s so personal. It’s like everybody has their own path. So having the confidence to just be different and just be yourself.

Tracy Yates:

Absolutely. Which comes down to being, right? It comes down to where we started the conversation. This comes down to being and having, and it’s not even about having to do it the way everybody else is doing it, having the wherewithal within yourself to see your true potency and power. And that’s what we’re missing.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. So I want to ask you before we run out of time, you sold your business, selling a business is a very emotional thing, right? Because it’s so personally kind of tied to you in a lot of ways. What was the process that led you to decide to sell it? What did it feel like to sell it? Talk to me about that.

Tracy Yates:

Yeah. Well the full story probably takes us into another podcast. But yes, it is very personal because it’s like having a baby. It’s birthing it, right? It’s growing it, it’s nurturing it. So it’s very personal. And really the reason why I ended up selling my business is, first thing is, I figured out that what I’m doing now… Because I did it on myself, and at the time, I did not realize what I was doing. And I think this is a perfect example of what we were talking about earlier. I was just working on myself and working, and learning how to work with energy, and diving into all these things because I wanted to grow, and I didn’t want to kill myself, and burn myself out, and sacrifice what mattered to me most. So through the process of doing this all myself, I actually created my framework and I had no idea at the time that’s what I was doing or why I was doing it.

So I realized that this process worked because I had the proof that it worked, and I really shifted really what I saw success as being for myself, right? Because success is unique to everybody. There’s no definition of success. And it really shifted for me because I wanted to give back. I wanted to help other people. And so I decided to sell my business, which again, was not an easy decision to make. It was actually something then I had to work through even more of my beliefs and fears, to sell your business and totally change careers. That is not an easy thing to do, especially after you’ve been doing… I had my agency for over two decades, but I was so passionate about it, and I knew, just going back to, I had unwavering belief in my vision of really redefining what we call high performance and helping other women entrepreneurs that I decided to sell and stepped into what I’m doing now. Which again was another level of my own growth, because we have this saying in this transformational industry, you know “You can’t take your clients further than you haven’t gone yourself.” And I continued to do the work, and I think… So that was my journey and continues to be my journey, but it’s become the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done, and I just feel so blessed that I get to do it every day.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s beautiful. Well, Tracy, you’re such an inspiration. I want to make sure that people know how to find you and work with you. What’s the best way?

Tracy Yates:

Sure. I’m on Instagram. I am Tracy Yates. You can also go to my website, tracy-yates.com, and I’m also on LinkedIn.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today. I know I needed to hear your message.

Tracy Yates:

Oh, thank you Melinda, it was wonderful.