The Entrepreneur Sessions: Lisa Weldon
Randy: Hello, this is Randy Kaufman from Aker Advisors. Welcome to the first episode of season two of To Grit with Grace: stories of perseverance to jumpstart your month. This year, we’re hosting To Grit with Grace: The Entrepreneur Sessions. Boy, are we excited.
We will release a podcast each month, and we hope you’ll join for the stories, the music, and the lessons learned.
Anyone who’s been an entrepreneur knows that the road to success is long, winding, and lonely. Highs for sure are higher, and lows are lower, and can be unbearable. Most give up along the way, as I almost did myself. Though this podcast, we hope to lend a helping hand to anyone who is struggling, and needs a little inspiration.
What even is an entrepreneur? The dictionary definition: one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise. So why are we focused on entrepreneurs this season? Well, entrepreneurs, more than any other class of people, truly embody the 4 Gs, in my opinion.
Entrepreneurs are gritty beyond words. In fact, studies show that the single biggest characteristic of entrepreneurs isn’t a propensity to take extreme risks, as many people assume. It’s grit.
Even the toughest, meanest entrepreneur exhibits grace, of course — you never want to let them see you sweat.
The growth mindset abounds, or they’d be sitting behind a desk, working nine to five.
Gratitude? Well, I built my career working with entrepreneurs, and all of the successful ones were grateful for each and every day, and or each and every person who helped them achieve their dreams along the way.
Today’s guest is Lisa Weldon. Lisa faced the unimaginable at the age of 58: financial infidelity, the collapse of a 25-year marriage, foreclosure on her family home, being aged out of her career. She barely avoided bankruptcy.
Yet, Lisa walked — literally — her way to a better place. “Trauma,” says Lisa, “makes you look at what’s important. If you focus straight ahead, take one small step at a time, ask for help, you can get out of that sinkhole and lead your best life.”
By thriving, and by surviving through sheer grit and growth, Lisa did make it through. She launched a successful social media consulting firm. She became a published author of Twenty Pieces: A Walk Through Love, Loss, and Midlife Reinvention. You can learn more about Lisa at lisaweldon.com. If you like what you see, read the book. I loved it. And, be sure to follow Lisa on Facebook and Instagram.
Walking
Lisa: Walking for me is meditation.
When I walk, and I put George Winston piano music in my ears, I am at my peak in creativity, I come up with ideas, and the more I walk, the more my mind opens.
I’m an art director by trade. I was trained to see things, so I can walk down the street of New York, and I can mute out honks, I can mute out what people are saying…I just see things, and get so excited about them.
And they’re little things. Like little gardens in East Harlem that are wedged between buildings, of course the graffiti that I see, or sitting on a bench, watching people get on and off of a subway. If you can just zone out, your mind just…mine just goes crazy.
Aged Out
A lot of emotional things happen when you get aged out. And in advertising, once you hit age 40, you’re aged out. Unless you own the place. Here I was at 58. I had been freelancing for 20 years. When clients started asking for website and social media, and I had to turn down the jobs, or I had to find somebody to teach me how to do it, it became obvious that I had not kept up with the times.
I think a lot of my image was because of my career. We are the first generation of women that had a choice. You know, our mothers could be secretaries, teachers, or nurses; we could do anything. We were sort of saddled with, come on women, let’s do well, let’s show the world we can do this. So when I couldn’t really do it…I started interviewing for jobs that were way beneath me, and not even getting callbacks. It was demoralizing, my self-confidence went out the door, and I knew there were things that weren’t right financially. But I just let them go.
My husband — let me say that we started our marriage on not solid footing. Within six weeks, we realized we had totally different styles of handling money. I was almost anal about mine, I had to know to the penny how much I had in my little checkbook. He felt that taking risk was healthy.
Not being told about what was going on, and not being privy, it becomes this mistrust issue. “Well let me see it.” “Well don’t you trust me?” I just felt like I could always fix it. I always felt like, we can power through this, we can fix this. He was willing to take odd jobs to fill in some of the losses he had.
The last time was just — the only home my children had ever known went away. We lost the home. I was able to save it out of bankruptcy and keep it just long enough to put it on the market and sell it, which was devastating for me, and devastating for the children. They were all heading to college or in college, so they didn’t have a home to come to. Emotionally, that was the hardest thing for me.
“You Have to Go”
Parsons, in New York, sent out a catalogue of all of their courses. They had 30-day summer intensives in New York and in Paris. I knew four or five years ahead of time that I needed to reeducate myself. And so, every November when they’d come, I’d go through those catalogues, through every single course. I’d cross out the ones I didn’t wanna take, and I’d highlight the ones I did, but I couldn’t afford it, so I’d eventually throw those catalogues in the trash.
On New Year’s Eve of 2010, I reached in the trash can and pulled out the latest catalogue. I went through all the ones I’d crossed out and zeroed in on all the ones that I’d highlighted. Something came over me that said, “You have to go. You have to go.”
So, I circled the course that peaked my interest the most, which was integrative design. After a glass of wine, I hit the enroll button, with no clue how I was gonna pay for it. But I was damn well gonna go.
This was my chance to live in New York, which I’d always dreamed of doing, for 30 days. And I figured that was all I was gonna get in my lifetime was 30 days. So I took a map of Manhattan, and sliced it with my exact-o-knife in 20 pieces. I said, “After each class, I’m gonna walk one of these pieces so I can savor every inch of Manhattan.”
They cancelled the course, and it gave me every single day wide open to not only walk each piece, but write about it. And then at night I went on YouTube and linda.com and taught myself the stuff I was gonna learn in the digital and social media class.
Pride
My very first day in New York was the Pride Parade, the night after they signed the equal marriage law. I’ve never seen a parade like that, never been involved in something like that. And I was just so taken aback by the openness of people in New York, those parading and also those viewing. It just felt so good.
And I got back to my apartment, and I wrote my little blog post, and I stopped cold. Because I was so afraid of what so-and-so would think about it, what so-and-so would think about it…how’s this gonna be received? So I didn’t publish it.
The next morning, I woke up and I said, “What the hell?” Click, publish, and off I went.
Just that act of holding myself back and then saying, “What the hell?” was huge for me. Because it is so freeing to just be yourself, and to put out there how you really feel.
If you ask me if I have a favorite neighborhood, it’s East Harlem. When I was there, I’d walk in places just where normal people were. One of them was a street that was roped off. There were a bunch of kids having summer camp on the asphalt, and I thought, they’re having just as much fun on this hot asphalt, and I thought I had to send my kids to these fancy camps in the woods, with all these rope things, and all these fancy cabins and all that. It just made me realize that sometimes all that stuff that we have brings us down and keeps us away from a real experience of life.
I’d always been a very private person, but having to put myself out there, and having to publish things that I’d written, and posting photographs of places I had to be was very uncomfortable for me at first. This was putting yourself out there without clothes on. Not only was I putting myself out there, but then, naked! [laughs]
It was really difficult at first. But then, I had a lot of positive feedback come back. From then, I think I just got a lot more confident.
Cut Out the Crap
You know what? There’s a freedom to letting go of trying to impress, trying to be perfect, trying to be a certain person. There’s a lot of freedom in letting go of all that.
I knew once I could reeducate myself that I could market myself. I had a lot of clients ask me to design websites or do social media campaigns, so I knew that once I got back, that I’d be able to boost my earnings.
I’d also been to a seminar at Georgia Tech, a big university here in Atlanta. They brought together older professionals and younger professionals, and the problem they were trying to solve was, the C-suite — CEOs, CFOs — knew they needed social media, and the new kids on the block knew how to do it, but those two groups didn’t know how to talk to each other. The CEOs were on Blackberries, and the new hires were on iPhones.
So I knew there was a gulf between them, and I thought that if I can educate myself, I belong in the old group, but if I can think like the young people, then I can get some business. And that happened immediately once I got home.
That happened when I made a presentation to the largest client I had ever had since going out on my own. As soon as I said that I knew social media, I knew I had the account.
Once you go through a trauma, you know what’s important, and you know what’s not important. You cut a lot of the crap out and you concentrate on what’s important. I don’t want it to happen to everybody, but trauma is actually a good thing. It was for me. It took me forever to get over it, and am I all the way over it? No, but I came out a better person.
Get rid of everything that’s not important right now and focus on straight ahead. If you can’t afford your house, move to a smaller one. If you can’t afford to live in the city, move to a small town. If you don’t need a second car — five of us had one car for over a year. And we did fine.
The other thing I’d say is, ask for help. I was — oh, the last thing I was gonna do was ask for help, because that was weak. Ask for help, because people love to help. Especially if you’re undergoing a traumatic experience, strangers will come out of the woodwork to help. And that’s a gift for them as well. But I would say pare down, buckle down, focus on what’s most important, and ask for help.
Randy: Thank you Lisa for sharing your story. Thank you to Dustin Lowman, my marketing manager, for producing and editing. Thank you to Aker Advisors and Heron Wealth for their financial support, and to all of you, for listening. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to share this with others. We’ll be back next month with another tale of entrepreneurial struggle and perseverance. Until then, I wish you well, with grit, with grace, with growth, and with much gratitude.
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