Following Passion with Tania Vasallo

This week on The Em Makes Money Show I'm joined by Tania Vasallo, an entrepreneur, a mother, and an international speaker.

Tania has such an infectious enthusiasm and shares how her unique path has led her to where she is now, supporting ambitious and motivated successful women to learn how to make, keep and grow their money and just create a life of freedom and happiness.?

We talk all about...

???How incredible it can be to follow your passion and curiosity?

?? What can happen when one opportunity burns to the ground

?? The power of putting yourself in the room with people who inspire and motivate you

?? The importance of just celebrating ALL of your financial??? milestones

?? And why we all need to stop comparing our journeys to others.?

One thing I love about Tania is that we have a very similar mission of female empowerment, financial freedom, and really life-first living. She has a drive and passion that infiltrates everything she does, and I'm excited to share a few of the key takeaways from our discussion.

1. Following your passion and curiosity can lead you to incredible things.

Tania's journey is a bit unconventional as she is the epitome of multi-passionate and leads from a place of curiosity. So while she started her career like many of us in corporate America, working in advertising as an art director in New York City for some huge multimillion-dollar corporations like Starbucks, Samsung, AT&T, and Nabisco, her journey to get where she is today took time as she followed her curiosity and explored different passions.?

While working, she began studying to be a life coach and then photography to become a professional photographer. And when she realized what she really desired was more freedom, she left her job (as did her husband), and together they built a creative agency with highs and lows. And after several years, when her husband wanted to focus solely on his art, she again followed her curiosity.

?As she put it, "I knew that there was something bigger for me, and I wanted to do it on my own, but I just didn't know what because of that multi-passion."?

And after a lot of soul searching and an eye-opening trip to a sales event with her sister that inspired her and motivated her to dream bigger, she ended up signing up for a $20,000 mastermind to learn ALL the things she could about business, sales, and marketing and launched her business, The Courage to Be Happy.

She explained: "The most I'd ever spent on a course was maybe, I want to say, $3,000, and it was like a week-long certification type of thing. But anyway, I paid the deposit. I did it. And what that does when you invest at that type of level is I was fully committed to learning everything business and everything sales and everything marketing in that year that I was part of that group. And it was a game-changer. I look at it now as if it was my MBA. Instead of spending $100,000 or $200,000 to do an MBA at Harvard, I chose to do it with this particular teacher. And it was a game-changer. Everything changed for me."

Within 4-years, she was working 20 hours a week with her young daughter at home, growing her business to 6-figures without social media by focusing on in-person events.

2. When one opportunity burns to the ground, another one is just around the corner.?

Now one of the amazing things about Tania's story is her business model was initially based on live events, where most clients came from local networking events and then joined her year-long program. And it worked!?

Then all of a sudden, 2020 came, and live events weren't a thing.?

As she put it, "It was like the slap in the face, but there's always a gift in everything. I don't like looking at things as failures or whatever, even though I did have my own pity party."?

(um... who wouldn't, by the way?)?

But by 2021, Tania had her first online three-day event. And even without much of a social media presence, the participants weren't just the locals–they were from all over the US. Canada, Colombia, Spain, England… she was reaching the whole world. As a bi-cultural woman who was born and raised in Spain… she heard the message loud and clear. It was time to go bigger, to go global.

So in 2022, she refocused her business online, strategically tapping back into social media and serving women across the world on her schedule.?

It was a chance to create even more freedom, to allow space and time to travel and be present with her daughter and family.

This is what I mean by life-first living.

3. Keep those blinders on and just celebrate all of your financial milestones without comparing yourself to others.?

Tania shared that she hopes this business reaches six figures in four years (maybe even two). And I just love her willingness to talk so openly about her timeline and her financial goals because growing a business from scratch to six figures in four years is ??% something to be excited about!?

Yet in the online space, it feels like some people are doing it in four minutes. Many of these people have been quietly building it behind the scenes but feel like they can't talk about how long it took.

As Tania (who, btw is a projector) said, "Things take the time that they need to take."?

She knows that her circumstances are unique to her, and you have to put things into perspective as far as what is most important to you:

? She wants to enjoy the years with her daughter

? She wants to have family time in connection with her husband

?She wants to travel.

And all of this comes into play when you think of those financial milestones and how long it may take you to reach them.?

For some, it may take longer than others, but this DOES NOT MINIMIZE just how amazing it is when you DO HIT THEM. So celebrate away!

4. Don't compare your Chapter Two you to someone else's Chapter Twelve.?

Financial milestones certainly aren't the only place we compare ourselves to others. And Tania and I both agree what it boils down to is we ALL need to STOP playing the comparison game.

With social media, it's so easy to see others' success and compare, but as Tania explained, "They might be in Chapter Twelve, and you're only in Chapter Two. So you're comparing your Chapter Two to their Chapter Twelve, and then you're beating yourself up about how slow your business is taking to grow and everything else."

And I agree.

What I've seen when I think about the people who have seemed to really take off inside of different programs I've been in, they typically aren't starting from scratch. They aren't at Chapter Two but instead are further along in this Chapter 12.

They already have an audience, maybe even a 2000-person low-ticket membership, they continue to grow their audience, and then they add in high-ticket coaching.?

What it boils down to is we all just need to stop comparing our journeys to each other's.

Tania has such an infectious sense of curiosity that has propelled her from training to training and certification to certification, and along the way, she has also done some hard work to heal some of her money wounds, and the full podcast episode digs into this. So give it a listen.

But I want to just share here how she explained this work around healing your money wounds, because I think she absolutely NAILED IT...

"Doing any type of money work, whether you're doing it on your own, whether you're working with Emily, whether you're working with me, whether you're working with whoever you're doing, it's an ongoing process. It's like forever. Money touches everything. And so we have to cultivate and improve this relationship with money ongoing. "

This was such a great discussion, and I encourage you to listen to the full episode to hear it all.