Are you a multi-passionate entrepreneur with Robyn Baldwin
What you’ll get out of this episode with Robyn:
- The definition of an alpha female
- What a multi-passionate entrepreneur is
- Tips for managing multiple business ideas
- Tips to thinking positively
- How to reduce stress in your life
- Ways to increase your self care.
Tell us a little bit about you and what you do as a work-life harmonist.
I am an alpha female and I got that term from a co-worker who said, “You do a lot but you kind of seem to have it all together.” I work full time in marketing. I started my career in advertising in media agencies and I’m now a multi-passionate entrepreneur side hustler. I’m a fitness lifestyle blogger over at robynbaldwin.com and I’m a freelance writer for sites like irun.ca in Canada. I’m a future best-selling author so I’m writing my first self-development book called Love Lost, Life Found this year, I’m a podcaster, I have the Alpha-female podcast, I am currently creating my first online course and I’m potentially future network marketer. I have my eggs in a lot of baskets.
Can you explain what a multi-passionate entrepreneur is?
I believed this term is coined by Marie Forlio and it’s just someone that want to put their hands in every single possible basket that they can because they have passion for more than one area of business.
Do you have shinny object syndrome if you’re so passionate?
For sure. I’m like, “What about this? What about this? I’m really good at this.” And that’s how things evolve. I started out as blogger in 2009 and then websites started reaching out to me and said, “We love how you writing, would you like to write for our site?” And that’s when I became a freelance writer. When I realize I really liked writing then I was like, “There’s a look inside me,” so now I going to become an author. When Periscope launched in the summer of 2015 I started scoping and realized I really love to talk. An amazing forum for that being able to give long form content was podcasting. It’s just kind of discovering what I like to do what I’m good at and then diving in and testing it in the waters.
Do you any have tips for managing all the ideas?
We’re both fans of Chalene Johnson and her way of setting push goals or finding your key priority is what has helped me immensely. I printed out her spreadsheet on ‘All Aspects of Life’ so that covers things from family, friendships, career, financial goals, leisure, health, fitness and you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being, “I could do better in that area,” 10 being, “I got this covered.”
I would sit there and rate everything and then I would pick each aspect of life that is a lowest score. When I did this last year in 2015 I found I had 3 aspects of life that had a lower score everything was 8 to 10.
My 3 aspects of life that were an 8 I looked at and I said, “What do I want to improve here?” That is my long term goal. Then I set smart short term goals to get to the long term goal. From there I looked at all 3 things. For me one is managing my health and making sure I’m the healthiest I can be at all times. The second one was relationships. I really wanted to build and grow a relationship with my boyfriend. The third one was career and money and I really wanted to monetize my side hustles to the best of my ability outside of my fulltime career.
I looked at all those 3 things and her way of scheduling push goals is like, “What is that one thing that you have to get done that will allow the other things to happen?” For me, monetizing my side hustle would allow me to make more money to be able to support a family in the future and as well that will allow me to support my health.
If I do that key priority which is launch that side hustle the other ones are covered. That’s an example of how I do that which can cause overwhelm. To reduce that overwhelm I’m a massive believer in using a written planner as well as the app Wanderlist to schedule 3 tasks a week that will get me to that large key priority and 3 tasks a day that support my 3 tasks a week. That’s how I reduce my overwhelm.
Outside of my fulltime job I only allow myself to look at those 3 things a week and 3 things a day and that allows the business side of to-do list to not overwhelm me and from there I also constantly ensuring that I do all of my healthy habits.
My biggest piece of advice for those that are either starting a side hustle or are entrepreneurs are don’t try to adopt more than one healthy habit a week because it’s too overwhelming to try to do more than that.
Why are you so passionate about helping women live a less stress life?
Because I don’t ever want another woman to have to deal with a health scare in their life. I’m definitely in a massive mindset of the cost of hidden stress and how it affects our bodies whether it’s psychological stress or emotional stress or even good stress, I think they call it you stress which means being busy everyday and having an amazing career and passion and balancing family but doing too much.
We sometimes call it good stress because it’s all stuff that we’re passionate about, that still stress to the body. I’m in a massive mindset that stress is causing rampant disease from the forms of cancer to auto-immune in our society and I want women to never have to deal with that by living a proactive healthy life.
I call myself an Alpha female so I’ve always been of the mindset like, “No. I got this. Stress doesn’t affect me I’m stronger than stress. I can handle it.” But it’s not true and the body will stop you when it’s not okay.
Let’s talk about your auto-immune disease MS you call that your side kick, what does that mean to you?
I call it my side kick because that way I see it as just a part of my life that I have to work with it instead of against to be successful in being proactive about my health. I definitely use the power of positive thinking and not calling it a negative word so that I can live my best life ever. I do believe that power of positive thinking allows us to take care of ourselves. In the MS world when I first started looking at hash tag MS on Instagram, I saw so many people calling MS the monster like MS the letters are in the word monster and so I saw that all over the place and I was just, “I get it.”
There’s varying degrees of disability and there’s 4 kinds of MS. I guess the worst kind I believe is secondary progressive and that is something where many of those affected are in wheel chairs and actually cannot walk any longer so I get that they’re calling it something negative but, one, I never want to be there. If I call it something negative then it can potentially take hold of my life so I’m going to call it something positive so that I can just take care of myself and never let it define me either. It is part of my, I guess bio. I call myself a MS warrior which is the positive term we use to identify ourselves in the community but I just never want to be defined, I don’t want to be an MS warrior first, I’m an Alpha female first and foremost.
How do you make the switch to positive thinking?
I am in this new mindset about hidden stress and after reading the book ‘When the Body Says No’ I realized that there’s the power of positive thinking and there’s like being too uber optimistic and there’s also the power of negative thinking. The power of positive thinking where it’s choosing happiness, you choose to take care of yourself and that’s what I believe is what I’m doing but then there’s also the power of negative thinking where it’s just identifying what is not serving you well.
When I read the book it also identified things like being in a toxic relationship which I was in 2012. Then being an over achiever is also a form of stress. Constantly trying to be better and do more and I used to be the type of person that would post on Facebook like, “I did this, this and this today you need to like this post.” That was my source of my achievement.
What are some things that people can walk away right now and start implementing so they can reduce stress in their life?
From a work perspective I set 2 alarms on my phone for breathing breaks and I do 15 deep breaths in the morning and I do the same in the afternoon. In the afternoon I also go for an afternoon walk whether it’s just around the block or to the local coffee shop for a cold press juice or an afternoon latte with almond milk.
I do yoga once a week and I love to read so I try to read on the weekends. There’s things at home you can do like candles or I’ve recently gotten into burning incense. I purchased my first salt lamp. I defuse essential oils during when I’m working at home in the morning I’ll defuse clarity ones like peppermint for energizing effects and then at night I’ll do lavender and things like frankincense. I’ll also put those in my bath. I’m a massive believer in therapy and I believe that we need to work through things that haven’t served us well in the past and identify patterns in why they exist so that we cannot keep creating them.
Let’s talk a little bit about being an Alpha female, tell about your podcast and what an Alpha female even is.
The podcast was inspired by some online haters that didn’t understand why I call myself an Alpha female and I realized I wasn’t doing a really good job. I had written a short eBook in 2012 about what it’s like to live like an Alpha female and just how I optimize my life in different ways. An Alpha female is a powerful and assertive woman. Her confidence is due to being an intelligent and intellectual problem solver as a state of mind base on just choosing ambition and being proud of it but she always strives her happy and healthy work-life harmony.
There’s type A Alpha female and we often come across as strong-willed and selfish because of all the things we’re trying to achieve in our life but when we stay true to our authentic selves and our mission, we just shine. She definitely puts the needs of herself first without sacrificing her principles and dignity. That means she fills up her cup or she fills up her gas tank first or puts on the airplane mask first and that way she has enough energy for her friends, family and co-workers.
A true Alpha female tries to strive for synergy in the world around her so she wants that perfect work-life balance. It means that you just pick your priorities and stay true to your priorities. She’s always trying to strive for better so we’re usually obsessed with self development but we also want to nurture the relationships with all the people in our lives.
The podcast was because my life is how an Alpha female looks a certain way and that’s not going to translate to everyone so I thought why not start interviewing other women that are Alpha female and get tips and tricks on what their work-life harmony looks like so that listeners can go, “That’s interesting.” It’s just providing different aspects of life to show that it all looks different but something will work for you.
RobynBaldwin.com, a former CFL cheerleader and fitness competitor, a published fitness model, a freelance writer, a future best selling author of the book Love Lost, Life Found (publishing August 25, 2016), a brand ambassador, a sponsored athlete and a podcaster. With a passion for fitness Robyn loves running, weight lifting, has taught spin and coached beginner runners. She’s also a yogi and has been practicing for over 10 years. She now spends the majority of her spare time training for obstacle course racing. She also calls herself an MS Warrior after being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in December of 2014. MS is a sidekick in her life that has taught her how to take the best care for herself and find her perfect work/life harmony.Connect with Robyn!
Robyn Baldwin
Twitter: @robynbaldwin
Facebook: Robyn Baldwin
Instagram: @robynbaldwin
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