We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lani Jackson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lani, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

Success didn’t happen for my business overnight. One of the things that held me back for so many years is that I was looking for the “secret sauce” or magic formula that everyone else seemed to know but me!

I kept thinking, I just need to know “one more thing” or once I learn this…. THEN I will see that income that I want!

The truth was, I didn’t need to know anything else. I just needed to decide to take ACTION on the things I already knew!

I am a mom of six kiddos. I easily became the marketing messaging that everyone uses now… “You are a mom entrepreneur who has too much to do and not enough time to do it!”
My to-do list was way too long and so I never felt like I accomplished anything!

My life and business changed when I decided I wanted a different story than every day being, “I am exhausted, I have too much to do, and not enough time to do it.”

Mindset was the first step.

The next was operations! Systems, processes and operations that organized my actions every day. Instead of a giant to-do list, I created prioritized actions that maximized my limited time and created a system that allowed me to track my results and impact.

The third step was letting go of “Consistency” and instead embracing flexibility and sustainability with my strategies! Everything had to be repeatable action in the midst of chaos of mom life and the small windows of time I have to work.

The final step, eliminating anything that wasn’t energetically aligned! If it didn’t fit with my energy, made me feel contracted, or didn’t feel expansive… I let it go.
No more doing things just because someone else said I “Should”

After these four shifts, my business income doubled, then doubled again, then doubled again in 6 months!

It is STILL the formula and method I use to grow my business every year. And it is also what I teach my clients.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a business strategist and mindset coach. I work with women business owners and entrepreneurs who have big dreams & goals for their business and life. I help them create customized business strategies that generate high profits in not only income but also time, energy, and fulfillment. Business is not one-size-fits-all or insta-results. Your business should fit YOU, your time, your energy, your goals, your priorities, your zone of genius!

I am a walking testimony of how your life and business can change when you stop trying to be everyone else, stop trying to copy someone else’s strategy, and step into an aligned business that focuses on using your strengths.

My favorite thing is to dive in deep with my clients and help them build a strategy that they know will scale their business to their income dreams, but also enjoy each step of the way!

My approach as a coach is to ask you powerful questions to uncover what you truly want & help you get creative with embracing yourself, and who you are with your actions and steps in the journey to your dreams.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn my to-do list! Because if everything is important then nothing is important. Being both a business owner and a mom and all the rest of life things that I had on my plate, I ended up trying to survive with a never-ending to-do list.

Because every day I had a list ten miles long which I was in no way going to be able to complete, I ended up training my sub-conscious brain to not trust me to do anything. Which led to this extreme brain fatigue! If you ever feel like your brain just won’t stop reminding you that you have this to do and that to do and don’t forget that… This was me all the time!

That never-ending to-do list set me up to feel overwhelm and defeated and exhausted from the moment my day started. It is a cycle that I see happen to often with women entrepreneurs.

Letting go of that to do list was LIFE-Changing! It’s not that I didn’t have things to do, it was that I stopped allowing the list to be in control of my energy, day, time, and life.

Now I have a method that I follow to filter out the “to-do’s” that pop into my head. I am able to determine if it is a “Do now. Do later. or a do Never.”
It always has changed my mental load with my brain learning to trust me again that I will do what I put into my systems & processes.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Being an entrepreneur is scary. No one tells you what to do. No one can guarantee you money. No one can guarantee it will work.

Belief. Mindset. Both of these are the MOST needed pieces for success as an entrepreneur.

A coach of mine once told me to “Stack the Evidence” for the next scary step.

Meaning, where can I find evidence in my past experiences that I can have success again? Where can I see that I have already done harder things that this? Where can I find evidence that I have done this before and can totally do it again?

Whenever I feel like the next step in business si really hard or really scary, I go back to my journey in motherhood of becoming a mom to six.

In the first trimester of my first pregnancy I had a miscarriage, but found out that I had twins and only miscarried one. And delivered my first son via emergency c-section.
My pregnancy I miscarried.
My third pregnancy was high risk and I had a half-a-million-dollar baby after all the procedures and hospital stays, and premie delivery and post-birth care for 4 months.
Then I had my third son with a high risk third c-section.

But we knew our family wasn’t complete.
We decided to open our home to foster care and adoption.
Our first yes was to twin girls in the NICU. We fostered them for a year. And during that time met their older brother. He came to live with us just after the girls turned one and he was just three years old.
Our adoption finalized a year later.

6 kids!!!! When my adopted son moved into our home my kids were 7, 5, 3, 3, 1 & 1.

Pretty sure I blacked out for part of that first year!

Birthing my boys and adopting my three youngest was some of the hardest things I have ever been through.

I had to navigate paperwork, rules, objections, physical set backs, emotional ups & downs, deal with grief & loss, fear of the unknown, pain, heartbreak, joy, abundance, frustration, and sooo much more.

No one I knew had a family like ours. No one I knew had the crazy journey like mine. Our story was so unique. And while some days I felt alone, I also see how if I had waited to know everything or tried to copy someone else, I would not have the beautiful family that I have.

I have all the evidence that I need to confirm that I can do hard and scary things. I have all the strengths. I have so much proof that putting myself out there on social media isn’t hard. That getting a no on a sales call isn’t going to break me. That I can take a risk in business for growth.
Because it is NOTHING compared to the journey of growing my family.

We all have stories like this. We all have so much evidence that we can do hard things, big things, amazing things!
Stack that evidence!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lanijackson.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/lanijjackson
• Facebook: https://facebooke.com/groups/brilliantmompreneurssociety
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCObuTOVNV6fEIrrcLZ6mFig/

Image Credits
Mandy Roach Photography