Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, really excited to talk about a topic that I’ve coached to in Wealthiest Year Yet in the past, I’ve coached to in Thrivers Society in the past, I’ve coached to in my salon in the past, but I’ve never talked about it here on the show. We are going to talk about the practice of choosing to be all in.
Now, this is a practice that I established for myself way back when. I probably started doing it, let’s see, my son wasn’t even born yet, so probably around 2012, something like that. And I had to call it something because that was a time in my life where I felt completely maxed out and overwhelmed like every single day.
I still have days. I have good days and bad days, but this was a season of my life where I felt like the walls were caving in and the salon was demanding a ton of my time. I had just started taking on coaching clients, so basically taken on a second job. My family—I have a very close-knit family—my family at the time was just my husband and my daughter. So those that live in my house with me were very, very, very close, and so I felt like there was a lot of need for me from them and my friends and my social life and all the things, right?
So I was feeling overwhelmed and I felt like there was this constant need for my attention. Can anybody relate? Like somebody needed me all the time, and listen, there’s still a lot of days where I feel this. And so I still practice all in, but in 2012, 2011, probably, I was at this tipping point where something had to give, something had to change.
I developed this practice truly out of survival mode, but now it has become one of the biggest gifts and blessings in my life, and I hope it’s something that can help you as well.
I wrote a definition for it. This is not the Webster’s definition. This is the Britt Seva definition. Choosing to be all in is the practice of focusing all of your time, energy, dedication, and effort towards a singular outcome or accomplishment.
And I think there’s a lot of people in this world, a lot of people listening to the show, who think that they’re all in, and friends, you are not.
Truly going all in is exceptionally difficult. I’m going to be honest. It hurts feelings and breaks hearts. There will be times when you go all in that you question if this is really the right thing for you to do, especially if you’re naturally wired like me as a saver, a doer, a people pleaser. Choosing to go all in, you have to not be the saver, the doer, and the people pleaser quite often.
Making that shift and change is hard. It’s also healing. It’s helpful. For me, it’s formed stronger relationships with those who matter the most to me and helped me to make progress in the areas they want to and become the best possible version of myself.
Let me give you an example of all in. Right now I’m recording this beautiful podcast for you. I’m not at home. My phone is in airplane mode. It is actually impossible to get a hold of me right now. If there’s some sort of emergency, my husband and daughter know where I am. They can come and find me at any time, but I’m not interested in receiving calls or texts from them right now. It’s just not necessary for me.
As I say that, you actually might think, “Well, that sounds cold. How could she shut her family out?” It’s not cold because on the flip side, when I am having dinner with my family, my phone is on a completely different level of the house.
Our kitchen and dining room is downstairs. My bedroom is upstairs. My phone is on the charger in my bedroom the entire evening. I have no reason to check it, to be on it. That’s just not necessary for me.
If you came to a dinner party at my house, never ever would I check my phone. If I come to your house for dinner, never ever do I check my phone. I am extremely present to wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, hence all in.
For those of you who have phone separation anxiety, this is going to be hard. For those of you who can’t imagine taking the call when your child calls you, this is going to be hard.
It’s taken me time to get this to a system that really works, but it’s also been the saving grace. I’ll tell you when I was working at the salon or even now I’ll be in the middle of a workday and my husband or my daughter will call me and be like, “Hey, what I was thinking was for this weekend, blah, blah, blah,” and I will immediately interrupt them and say, “I’m sorry, is this an emergency?” And they’ll say, “No, sorry, bye,” and they’ll hang up.
‘Is this an emergency?’ is our essential code word for being all in.
What’s fascinating is I started this practice when my daughter was probably eight, just a little cutie pie. Now she’ll be 18 this year. So she’ll now do it to me. I remember the first time she did it to me. I texted her back, I had tears in my eyes just saying it, and I said, “I’m so proud of you,” because I realized that she actually appreciates the gift and the blessing of being all in. And I watched the young woman she is now, and my gosh is she bright, brilliant, confident, like she’s going to be a leader one day. It’s exciting to see the value she’s been instilled with and the way she cares for her friends and the way she cares for her family. It’s just different. She’s truly somebody who practices all in and we have that mutual respect for each other, of it is okay to say, no, you cannot have a piece of my time right now.
We don’t just need to say that to people. We need to say that to projects. How many of you have a million things on your to-do list that are nagging at you saying, “Do me next! Me next! Me next! I’m important. I’m important. Here’s a trend. Here’s a trend. Here’s a class. Here’s a workshop,”? There’s no shortage of opportunities for any of us.
When you practice all in, you say no more than you say yes, and the nos actually empower you to your biggest, best life.
Let’s take a look at what it looks like to start implementing all in and then some tools to get it in practice for you.
The first thing we have to have in place for all in is dedicated office hours and dedicated time off. So an established salon schedule, if you’re working in the salon, and then established time off.
What that means is when you are in the salon taking clients, you’re not checking your phone. Clients aren’t calling you in the middle of a haircut with Eric to book their next appointment. Those kinds of things, like business scheduling things, should happen in the salon, but either before you start taking clients between guests during lunch or after the end of your day, period.
I don’t think you should be booking appointments from home. I don’t. I think it makes for a really blurred personal life, speaking from personal experience. I don’t recommend that. I think that when you are at the salon, you should be hyper present at the salon, and then when you’re at home, you should be hyper present at home. I think it’s healthier for everybody.
Now that doesn’t mean if you want to call your family on your lunch break, do it. If you want to call your family between clients, go for it. What I mean is, if you were in the middle of something, you’re in a stride with something, you’re working towards something, you don’t allow that time to be interrupted, right?
How many of you will on a Sunday spend two hours working on social media? How many of you will spend an hour and a half on a Monday responding to client messages and booking appointments? I’m okay with that, but only if you’re finding two established days off somewhere else. I think at minimum, just as human beings, we need to have at least 48 hours every single week where you’re not working on work.
This is a practice that’s really important, especially for those of you who are choosing to take on a second job, right? My stylists who were also salon owners, my stylist or salon owners who are also educators, when you take on a second job, do you create reprieve to make room for that? Or did you just tack it on?
Like if you were a stylist who wanted to become an owner, I hope you scaled your styling schedule back to days so that you could have two days to dedicate to being an owner, or you’re only taking clients from 9 am to 1 pm, and then you are managing the salon in the afternoon, evening, or vice versa.
Same with being an educator. Being an educator only really makes sense if you’ve created time in your life to make it possible. Otherwise, you might not feel the burnout for five years, six years, 10 years, but it is for sure coming, and I don’t want that to hit for you.
Having dedicated office hours and dedicated time off is critical.
Two, don’t pick up one job without scaling back another. We just talked about that.
Three, choose your top five. So I’ve shared this before, I only have a top three. It’s my husband, my son and my daughter. That’s it. So as long as they’re squared away, I can manage the rest.
And that was hard. I will say I lost some relationships in that process. I lost some family. I lost some friends. It was incredibly difficult. It was also the best thing I could’ve ever done for my family, myself, my marriage, my children, everything.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t have wonderful friends in my life, and it doesn’t mean I don’t have wonderful family in my life, but I couldn’t juggle the being all in on my family, being all in on my career, taking care of myself, jumping when a family member needed something.
One of the things that made me realize it is that often when I needed support, there wasn’t that same level of like jump, like everyone’s all in. It was I’m a natural fixer, so those around me are used to me being the one who just shows up and fixes everything and waves the wand and it’s all good.
When I couldn’t be that person anymore, I realized like, oh, that was a huge value in this relationship is that I was self-sacrificing to make this relationship work. And when I’m demanding respect, or when I’m saying I’m not available to you, but here is when I am, you’re not into it.
As an adult, I don’t have the capacity to be everything to everyone, so I choose to have fewer, very high-quality relationships than a slew of relationships that are just kind of okay. To me, I’d rather have the quality over the quantity, and even though it’s really challenging, it became a necessity.
That being said, I’m always willing and open to rebuilding relationships that maybe didn’t come together, but those people who come back into my life have to realize I’m not the same person I was, right? I’m this evolved person who now puts myself and my top three first, and I practice all in. So I’m available to you and I’m all in available to you, but on my terms, not on your terms, on my own.
You can call that healthy boundaries, but the all in portion of it is like a next level, right?
Then get comfortable saying no and embrace the reality that you will make some people mad when you go all in.
And I did, and I will say, because I wasn’t educated on all in, I didn’t see that coming, and there was a lot of grief and self-doubt and self-deprivation when that happened, because I thought, “Wow, I just can’t win. Like I’m finally making time for myself and people are still angry.”
But then I realized that’s okay, Britt, because you did this because you were breaking. I was broken. I was so overwhelmed with the pressure and the need for me to be everything to everyone all the time and be available by phone and available by text. And I just messaged you. Did you see it? Can you come, blah, I couldn’t. I was at my own breaking point. So to save myself, I had to make these decisions.
When I started getting good about saying no, oh my gosh, did my life not become 10 times better. It allowed me the capacity to have really beautiful and deep relationships with those I can go there with, and with those who can’t get on my level and are frustrated when I don’t respond to their texts 16 times a day, oh well, because the people I am invested in relationships with, they also practice all in. Neither of us holds judgment against the other when we need a little space in time. That to me is a healthy adult relationship and that’s what I’m looking for now.
Next, I talked about this, step six: detach from your phone. You do have to release the FOMO a little bit. Like some DMs are going to have to wait. You’re going to miss some videos on your phone. You might not post at the optimal time. You’re going to miss some stuff. Hopefully, your clients still aren’t texting you. Hopefully, you’re not running a text-based model, ‘cause if you’re not, it’s just one less thing to have to phase out.
But it is—I mean, there’s study after study, after study, that is like your virtual umbilical cord to the world. Your phone is. You want to be available to anyone for anything at any time, no matter what under any circumstance.
The amount of pressure built into that smartphone is terrifying. And if you want to feel badly about yourself, my gosh, that’s the first way to do it, is to just see the guilt and shame. When you haven’t created an all-in system, you go back to your phone after not looking at it for three hours and their screen is filled with notifications.
Is anybody else like, “Oh my goodness, now it’s a part-time job just to catch up.” That’s not all in. If you’re feeling that, that’s one of the first things that has to go.
Lastly, get the tools to help you. Again, like I said, there has to be systems in place to allow this practice to happen. One of the things I mentioned really briefly is if you’re still allowing clients to text you by phone, to make an appointment, all in will be hard.
With text messaging in general, if you send a text, none of us are stupid and most people don’t practice all in, so you assume that your friend has their cell phone, right? You assume that your family has their cell phone. And then what do you say when they don’t text you back? “Well, I know they saw it. I know they saw that text message. I know they were on there.”
For me, my friends and family can’t say that because I’m hardly ever on my phone. I don’t live for my phone, so it’s not so shocking like I don’t get back to you for two days. They’re reasonably like, “Oh, you probably weren’t even on your phone.” That’s right. Because they understand that these are my values and this is what I do.
But if you’re someone who lives on your smartphone, then yeah, it’s offensive when you don’t text back in 2.5 seconds.
For me, I don’t want that kind of pressure of somebody mad at me when it takes me 90 minutes to send a text. If I’m doing something productive or that makes me happy, I don’t want shame or guilt attached to it or to have any funky feelings on the flip side.
One of the tools we need to have is business optimization. We talk about those things in Thriving, and then in Scaling, we really double down that having the tools in place.
The other thing is verbally explaining what’s going on. When I first decided to go all in, it was a conversation first with my husband and I sat down with him and I said, “So I’m literally about to snap.” And that’s a phrase he’s heard many, many times since then, I’m sure. I said, “I’m at a snapping point, I’m at a breaking point, and I think I’ve realized what I need. I need to be all in to whatever it is I’m doing.”
He said, “Tell me what that means to you.” And I said, “If I’m at work, I’m at work. If I’m at home, I’m at home.” He said, “I’m good for it so long as you mean it.” I said, “Tell me about those terms.”
My husband’s a really good partner, so we’re good at talking like this. He said, “You know, if you’re going to commit to doing this, I can respect that boundary. If you need time to work uninterrupted, I get it. I got it. I don’t want to add any undue pressure. I got it,” he said. “But when you’re at home, I need you to mean it. I don’t want to sit next to you on the couch while you’re on your laptop. I don’t want to sit next to you on the couch while you’re playing on Instagram. So if you’re going to be all in, be all in. Let’s do this. We can all do this. This will be great for all of us, but you have to mean it.”
He now holds me to it, and if I start to slip, he’ll say, “Are you still doing that all in thing?”, knowing that I am, but that’s his subtle indication of “Remember, remember this commitment.”
It has to go all the ways. So if you’re going to do it, it’s a conversation with those you love the most, and it gives them the understanding of if they call you, if they text you, knowing that you’re at work, maybe knowing that you are—like my husband, if I’m having a girls’ night, he’s not going to call or text me to interrupt. We have an understanding. I said, I’ll text you when I get there. I’ll text you when I leave. He knows where I am. I’m accounted for. He’s not worried about me, but he’s—“When you come home, what are you doing? Got a question for you. What are the kids want for dinner?”, none of that stuff and I do the same for him because we allow each other to be all into whatever it is we are doing, right?
The other thing is, I will say it’s even been really good in our marriage. So if my husband and I are on a date night and my daughter texts me, she’s going to have to wait. If I’m out to dinner with my husband, she’s going to have to wait. I don’t know what it is she has a question about, but she’s smarter than that. She wouldn’t even bother us unless it was an emergency, but we don’t allow ourselves to be interrupted in focused time. Even if we’re like mom and dad are going to watch a movie, the kids need to go away and stay away. They know better than to interrupt because we are all in.
It’s the same with the kids. I do stuff one-on-one with each of the kids. We do stuff as a family, but whatever it is we’re doing, we don’t allow distraction to become a part of it, and we don’t allow anything to get in the way of all of us moving forward.
I use all in with my career, with my team, with my family, with my friends, with my social life, with myself, with essentially everything. You can call it compartmentalizing, you can call it focus. But what I found is it allows me to get bigger, better results faster.
Now, when going all in with your business, let me take this to the next level. If you’re going to choose to go all in with your business, how many of you are multi-passionate? Me. I am. I want to do and accomplish 45 things at any given time. If I’m going to go all in on my career, I can only do one. If I try to do too many things, I won’t be able to do them well. So I will do one thing, see it to the fruition, see it to the finish line. When that thing is done, I may bring in something else when that is done. I may bring in another thing, but I don’t continue to add to the plate. I’m all in on whatever it is I’m doing.
I’ll tell you a little bit about my work schedule. I only take meetings on Mondays and Thursdays. You cannot book anything with me on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday. I still work very hard Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, but it’s creative time. I have a specific day of the week I do podcasts. I have a specific day of the week I’ll take interviews. I have a specific day of the week I work on course content because I want to be all in on whatever it is I’m doing.
The other thing that prevents me from doing is if I see a shiny squirrel, like I listened to an Audible book and I get tempted to do something, when I look at my weekly schedule, friends, there is no room in the schedule for me to take on anything more. I’m already committed to being all into what I’m being committed to.
A tool that I use, I use our Wealthiest Year Yet planner. I introduced Best Year Yet to the industry in 2019, and in 2020, we included a hardbound printed planner that was included with the program.
This year, the planner is on another level. It is absolutely stunning. We have really taken it to a new place. At the time of this recording, we’re already 50% sold out of the planner. We did a presale to Thrivers Live and we have remaining planners and courses are going to be available for sale to our Thrivers first. If we have any remaining, they’ll go to sale to the general public.
But it is a planner that is divided up into six sections: North Star, Social Content, Reflect, Strategize, Execute. We work to make sure that you are creating your biggest, best, most accomplished year with focus. Instead of just doing stuff, we’re doing the stuff that actually pushes your business forward.
If you want to take a look at what that looks like, you can head to thrivingstylist.com/wealthiestyearyet.
You can just take a peek there, but what I really want you to ask yourself is, do you see a benefit of going all in? Are you generally feeling scattered? Are you generally feeling overwhelmed? Are you generally feeling like there’s a fight for your attention all the time? Because if there is, all in is a really good practice for you.
Now, for those of you who are salon owners, who are like, “But how do I do this in my salon?”, remember I just told you I’m only available for meetings with my team on Mondays and Thursdays. It was hard for them to adjust for a few months and now they’re in the zone with it. They know when to find me, where to find me. It’s actually better for them.
So you can create these boundaries in all areas of your life. The key is to create a system, express what you’re doing, be super clear about it, commit, and go all in on being all in.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
