F*** Manifesting And Do This Instead With Frenchie Ferenczi

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00] Hey, Hey, today's game is Frenchie Ferenczi is a growth and marketing strategists for seriously ambitious. Experts and creatives. We've been friends on the socials for a while. And I recently saw her speaking about something. That I thought was just the kind of controversial take we like on this show. I'm going to warn you that today's episode, you're going to want to put headphones in around the littles As I some very necessary, but quite colorful language. Hey Frenchie. Welcome to the show. Frenchie: Thank you. Hi Diane. How are you? Diane: Good, thanks. I'm so excited to dive in with you today, but let's start off with a little intro to you and your business journey. Frenchie: Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm Frenchie Rezi that is my born name. I did not change my name when I got married because I liked my name too much. And I am a business strategist and advisor. So I work mostly with experts in creatives. Really helping them figure out the path forward as they grow their business, as they find kind of that more sustainable success. I am anti. Flash in the pan. Success. I like, don't give a shit if you've made a hundred K in six months and then you disappear off the planet. Right? I want people to find that consistency and that predictability in their business. And I came to this through startup life. I was an exec in startups like the Wing, Noya House, and really learned a lot just from growing these larger businesses. And when I left the Wing and decided to start my own business, I realized that. I was tired of working for VC backed companies and helping them make more money, and instead wanted to make or help individual business owners make more money and keep it for themselves rather than, you know, funneling it back to an investor. So that's how I landed here. Diane: Wow. I think it's interesting , I feel like we are the same person in two different bodies. we have slightly different backgrounds, but a lot of our opinions are very similar to each other, which is always fun to discover. And I do. love how you manage to, sum things up in business. It's one of the things that really draws [00:02:00] me to you. I know you have like your philosophy of like, stay close to the money. Short, punchy, easy to follow. But I recently saw you doing a presentation and I was like, we have to talk about this. And the title of the presentation, everybody Brace Yourself. This one's gonna be controversial, is Fuck Manifesting. And. Immediately, I was like, okay, this is a conversation you and I need to have so give us , the intro blurb to Fuck manifesting. This is definitely gonna be an explicit episode. If anyone's got little kids, now is, it's already too late, but put headphones in. Frenchie: So fuck manifesting is really just about this idea that I think we've gotten to a place where we're over indexing on these kind of bigger ideas, these out of body ideas of around business growth, around personal wellbeing, around everything, right? And it is, Gosh. I mean, I don't even know where to begin, but basically when I talk about fuck manifesting, I'll start there. I really mean like we can have the big dreams, we can have the big vision. If you're a vision board person, cool, I celebrate that. But also you need to take action. You need to take the steps towards that desired outcome that you want. And I had conversations with people and people would be like, you know, maybe I'm just a bad manifester, and I'm like, No, no, you just aren't doing the things you should be doing. Right? Like you're not a bad manifester. But I think kind of in the online space where business and woo and spirituality and soul marketing, whatever that means, have all started to like intertwine. It has become a little bit of a just space where. We're using kind of like personal journey strategies for business and business strategies for personal journeys, and everything's becoming a little bit [00:04:00] too interwoven. And so, you know, when I think about fuck manifesting, what I really want for people is to actually start to just take the steps because the people who are quote unquote good manifesters, right? If we're looking at like, You know, I'm thinking about some big people in this space who consider themselves manifesters. That's because they worked their tails off, not because they were just like manifesting. Diane: I think the support, the good PR that it's got because it's the antithesis of something else that's hap that happens in business. And that is when you start business and you join these like coaching programs and things like that, where everything that goes wrong is your fault, Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: no matter what you've done, oh, it's not the program. The program could never be wrong. It must be you. It's your fault. Whereas manifesting almost is, well, if you give it up to the universe. Frenchie: Yeah. Diane: not gonna be something else that you feel like you have to blame yourself on, or you've been through one of these programs, you've lost so much trust in yourself that you're reaching for something that will hopefully kind of save you. Frenchie: And it is. A great tool for people to make money on because it's so intangible that you can actually never know if you've gotten it or not, right? And like, how fantastic is that for a person? Sorry, this is a stretch. Some people aren't gonna like this, but for a person who's delivering a half-ass product, how great is it to be able to lean on something that's completely immeasurable, that's completely intangible, and that's like, oh, maybe next time just manifest harder. Diane: Yeah, and interestingly it goes back to, well, you didn't manifest, not Frenchie: Yeah, Diane: didn't work again. You did something wrong. And I think that's such a dangerous place for us to live in, in, in a business. Frenchie: And the thing that really gets me this is, I mean, I don't wanna make this political, but just [00:06:00] like it seems sometimes like a similar comparison to me to like, Pro-lifers who are also pro-gun, you know, where you're just like, these two things seem diametrically opposed, where it's like you need to manifest more. And then if you haven't done that well, well then your mindset is broken and you're like, well, you're the one who's telling me that I, you know, I'm not manifesting well enough, so I'm turning against myself. And then you're also telling me that my mindset's broken. So I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to navigate the space between. Diane: Yeah, and I think there's also that element of. did you manifest it or were you an extremely good looking blonde white girl with a hundred thousand followers so you got a room upgrade? Frenchie: Yeah, yeah. I do think that that a lot. Diane: It's not that I don't think manifesting is a thing. I think being able to see where you're going, having that big vision that's driving you towards it, if that causes you to take action and detach yourself from how that outcome might show up so that you keep an open mind, that makes complete sense to me. Frenchie: Yep. Diane: But it has to have that like middle piece of action. Frenchie: I think about this a lot. So, I remember Marie Forlio saying at some point when she was writing her book, you know, she wrote 15 times a day, like, my book is a number one New York Times bestseller. Right? She said, I wrote it 15 times a day and then it happened. Right? And what I think something like that does, right Where a lot of people will just simplify. They'll be like, she manifested it. Sure. But to your point, I think that's what keeps you really laser focused on the goal. That's what keeps you in the space of throwing all of yourself at your success, like Susie Moore says, which I kind of love as an idea, like why wouldn't you give all of yourself to your success? And to say it's just manifesting becomes an oversimplification, right? Like it just becomes this space where like, You know, you can write that 15 times a day, but if you don't have a book that you're not, and you're not promoting it, right, like there's so many pieces along the way, like I could be writing that, but I [00:08:00] have no book to sell, so probably not gonna happen. Diane: Right, right. If writing it 15 times a day makes it something that's so ingrained in your brain and that enables you to take action towards doing the thing. But like you said, we could both sit here and write 15 times a day. I'm a number one bestselling author, and now, I don't even write a blog, like I don't think it's happening for me. Frenchie: Exactly. Diane: so if manifesting then is about the action, Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: Let's say we've set the big visions, we've got the big dream. We know we need to detach from how we're gonna get there. Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: How do we build the action step to make the manifestation happen? Frenchie: Well, it's not gonna make the manifestation happen. It's gonna help the goal happen. Diane: It's gonna help the dream happen. I don't want people who are listening who are very, like, for me, I think you and I talk about it as goal or dream, and they talk about it as manifestation. I think we mean the same thing. Frenchie: Yeah. Diane: I'm just trying to go like, okay, if you are a manifestation person, let's use your lingo. Manifestation. Detachment. Let's talk in the action step. But yes, I take your points. It's a goal that's gonna come about from action. Frenchie: yes, yes, totally. Like I said, manifestors out there, I, or like you said, rather I celebrate them, right? Like, I'm like not, I don't want to undermine this overall idea, but I really want to encourage anyone who loves manifesting to like fuel that with action, right? And. Informed action. So there's a couple pieces to it, right? I mean, obviously there's the whole idea of strategic planning, which is hugely important and we could talk about for hours and like much longer than a podcast. But really what I've started to see is that there's three things that are necessary as you are kind of before you can even get into building a strategy, right? So the first one, I'm actually, this is gonna be a fun one to chat about a little bit more, is. To get real about your why. [00:10:00] I have seen that tons and tons of people have these really noble missions or their, you know, w or capital w y in their business. And what actually gets people to get their ass outta bed in the morning and sit down and work is typically not that mission. And if we don't own the real why, it is very hard to get to the end result that we actually want. Diane: And I think. Because we hear about these big noble whys. Like if somebody has a big noble, why they often wanna tell you about their big noble why. And if you don't have a big noble, why? I find that people can just freeze. Like they're almost incapable of doing anything because they're stuck at step one of like, what is my big why? Frenchie: Right? Diane: a big why. And when I talk to people about that and I'm like, do you wanna send your kids to college? Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: yeah. I was like, is your business gonna pay for that Frenchie: Yeah, a thousand percent. And I think that there needs to be just more of a conversation around owning it, right? Like it is evolutionary that we are more self-interested than we are in others. Right. So that is just purely survival. It is necessary. It is important. And what I've kind of started to see is that there's four areas that people's real wis are in, and none of them sound pretty, which is why nobody likes to talk about them, right? So one is money, the other is status. The other's power. And then the fourth is revenge. Those are the greatest motivators of individuals and most of us have a few of them all together. Like I certainly, I'm like less on the power side. Money, I love status, feels great and revenge. I have plenty of revenge I want, you know? Diane: world's weirdest Venn diagram, Frenchie: Yeah. Diane: commit, murder reasons to start a business. Frenchie: Totally. But if we're [00:12:00] honest about it, right, like we all have these like more self-interested shadowy sides, and I think that it's important that we don't just lead with the like, beautifully packaged mission statement. I help x Y with Y so that they can Z you know, like it just feels really tricky and. From a purely tactical strategic perspective, you need to be clear about the actual goal, right? If the goal is to pay for your kids' college, for example, you need to be really clear in order to start building a strategy towards that. If not, again, we get back into some of the vagary around what is manifesting, what actually, you know, are you good at it? Are you bad at it? There's no real measure. Diane: Do think one thing that will help people with this particular step is in entrepreneur land mission statements and whys have become marketing, Frenchie: Yes. Diane: never what they were designed for. Mission statements, values, vision statements are all meant to be internal. Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: your team, and if you don't have a team, it's internal to you. It's like meant to guide you. It's not meant to be the thing that is like unless you are a social impact. Like if you're a nonprofit, yes, your mission needs to be clear. If you are a social impact driven company like Tom's, you want to share shoes with the whole world. That makes sense, right? If it's just you, you don't ever have to tell anyone what your wire is. That for me, I think is very freeing to people. No one ever needs to know what it is except you, and maybe later your team. Frenchie: totally. But I also think that, and this is just from like my startup experience, That, like when I was working at The Wing, for example, right? The mission was the advancement of women through community. That mission did not trump [00:14:00] the mission to make a profit and repay our investors. And I think sometimes that gap gets really complicated, especially in these larger corporate settings. So, What kind of helps us as individual business owners or small teams is that we can keep more of that behind the scenes, but these larger organizations are also struggling because it feels, you know, when you're too mission driven. Then it starts to feel kind of gross to people when you're also making money. And I think that we need to shift that, right, and shift that kind of perception of other businesses as well, so that we can make more space for ourselves to own those truths. Diane: Yes. Okay, so we're getting clear on our why. Frenchie: Getting clear on our why? On well, on our real Why. Diane: real why, sorry. Frenchie: No, no, no. Diane: On our private wide, not necessarily Frenchie: private. Why? our. Exactly our private why? The why that you like might not even wanna tell your best friend, but that you're like okay. Second thing, making decisions. Learning to make decisions rather than waffling. This is such a big one because even when people are manifesting sometimes they don't even know exactly what they want. And you sure. Even if I was like a hundred percent like yes, if you manifest it, it will come. You need to be really clear about what that is. Right. Like when I feel like I see this in the dating world a lot, right? Like when people are manifesting, they're like, they're in detail about the person they want to attract into their world, right? It's not like, oh, a person. It's like a person who does this kind of work, who is this kind of personality and this height and blah, blah, blah. So I think, but you need to have the ability to make decisions because. The reason I see so many people not make forward progress is not because they're [00:16:00] not good manifesters, it's not because they're doing the wrong work necessarily, but it is because they are. In limbo all the time, and I am always on li like airing on the side of making the wrong decision Over indecision the wrong decision. Still informed you so much more about your business, about your audience, about all of those sorts of important data points that you need. Then indecision. Indecision is just you in conversation with you over and over again for as long as you let it happen. Whereas making decisions and putting things out into the wild and really allowing yourself to kind of get, get outta your own way or just like. Connect and collaborate with your audience is enormously valuable, right? But the missing piece there and the nuance there for a lot of people is that. Sometimes we don't even know that we need that there's a decision to be made, right? So it's not only getting good at making decisions, but it's also identifying and understanding when something is a decision that you need to make rather than a brainstorm, rather than a question that you need to answer rather than all sorts of other things. Diane: Yeah. I like to tell people with decisions that not making a decision is making a decision. You're deciding to do nothing in that space, so you don't get to like, let yourself off the hook by going, okay, I'm gonna have another little brainstorm tomorrow and then I'm gonna get out my sharpie. And then I'm like, you've, you've effectively made a decision to do nothing. To not solve the problem, to not take any form of action. And I think that is a, like you say, an dangerous place to live. Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: make a decision, get some data, make another decision. Like this is not life and death. What we do like, and is anyone listening as a surgeon, please, you need to [00:18:00] make the right decisions. The rest of us, we can afford to make a wrong decision here and there. Frenchie: Absolutely. And it's interesting because I think that it, you know, people connect to this idea more when we're talking about smaller things, right? So when I give examples about my client who's like, I'm working on a lead magnet, right? And you're like, oh, okay, what's your lead magnet? And they're like, oh, I'm not sure yet. I'm deciding between two different topics. And that's where I'm like, Oh, okay. So we need to decide first and then you'll be able to work on your lead magnet cuz you're not working on it right now, you're thinking about it. But then where I see people really start to freak out is when we start to get into the bigger decisions. So, for example, launch decisions and. You know, should I do a webinar launch or should I do a email only launch, for example? And that's where people will just be like hemming and hying. And I think the other thing that we need to understand is that, And I know this isn't obvious, but there is inherent risk in being an entrepreneur. And with that inherent risk means that we're gonna make the wrong decisions where our launches might perform less well underperform. But we are gonna keep getting that information so that we can do better. And I think that's where I see a lot of people being like, but, but what if it, my launch doesn't go as well as I want because I did all of these things and I'm like, That sucks. I get there. I get that. I've been there, right? Like I've had my launch not perform as well, but you still need to decide and do it. Diane: Yeah, I think it's one of those things that, you know, if you. You became an entrepreneur because you didn't want someone else to make decisions for you. Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: the flip side of that is that you then have to make decisions for you, Frenchie: Exactly. Diane: Okay, so real. Why make decisions. Frenchie: And then the last part is tied into this idea that I talk about all the time, which is staying close to the money. Right? And staying close to the money is just about understanding how you can [00:20:00] maximize the ROI on your time and energy. What work right is most likely to. You know, for most people it's money. Other people might be like, stay close to the time or stay close to the whatever. But let's just call it stay close to the money for the, you know, for the purpose of this conversation, you want to make sure that where you're spending your time is actually what is driving the revenue and the growth in your business. Diane: hard to do because it's usually not the thing you're the most excited to do. Frenchie: Absolutely. It's usually not the thing you're most excited to do. It's usually not the easiest thing, right? So people love to just do admin work sometimes. Not everybody, but some people because you checked the list. It is done. It has a big Diane: a to-do list. Oh, Frenchie: yes. Yeah. Look at you. You're just getting excited just thinking about it Diane: Oh, there's a spreadsheet. I can't wait. Frenchie: And sometimes those things need to be done, but sometimes we prioritize those things over reaching out to a potential collaborator or reaching out to a potential client because those are scarier and those are, you know, all the things. But which one of those two is closer to the money? Probably the outrage Diane: Yes, the spreadsheet's never gonna reject you though, though the hashtag ref is is is pretty soul destroying at the best of times. Frenchie: That is pretty soul destroying. I get that. But anyways, yes, it's never gonna reject you, but some staying close to the money does mean that sometimes you are gonna get the rejection, right? So it's essentially like if you don't try, you're the person rejecting yourself from the opportunity. And if you do try, you might get rejected, right? And. It doesn't always mean that it's a sale. It doesn't always mean that it's the thing that is going to immediately drive revenue, but what you wanna start to do is understand where have your sales come from in your business, and then how do you start doing more of that? [00:22:00] So in my world, for example, I get a lot of new clients, a lot of new leads when I do guest speaking in masterminds, in groups and places like that. So I pitch myself for those a lot. To me that is something that is close to the money, even if I'm pitching myself for something that's gonna happen six months down the line and all that. So it's not necessarily about the immediacy so much as it is about the impact and the efficacy. Diane: Yeah, it's like this is a high ROI activity. It's probably something that only you can do, even if you have a team Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: more likely than not. Frenchie: Yes. Diane: I think one thing I find useful in this particular space is, and I say this because I know that there's a lot of like Eat the Frog advocates out there who will say, you need to sit down at your desk and you need to do that really hard thing first of all, whatever, whatever. And so a lot of people hear that and they try it and they fail and they feel miserable, I believe. You need to have the little quick win before you eat the frog. Like it can just be a tiny little quick win. And it doesn't even have to be like a work related quick win, but just like when you start your day, like do something that you know you're gonna be successful at, that's gonna be, this is why in an opt-in, you give somebody a quick win because it builds them to that momentum. And so I know some people are are, eat the frog. You can sit down, you can go for it. I would never sit down at my desk. If I knew the first thing I had, like I can get myself to sit down to like do the little momentum task and then I'll do the frog. But if I had to sit down and start gnawing on a frog, like I'm never coming to my desk ever. Frenchie: Yeah. Totally. And you have the wisdom to know that about yourself, right? I think that's the important piece. And I agree. Like I. I think that you need to figure out what the quick win is. And the reason that I like using information about what has worked in the past is that it's much more motivating for me to do it than something that's entirely new where I'm like, it's, it's a gamble, [00:24:00] right? So even though, yes, there is the little bit of that fear for, from the outreach and what if they say no or you never hear back or what have you. But knowing that it's been good for my business in the past, I'm like, okay, I, this is worth doing. Right? This is worth my Diane: You've got some actual data, like I'm investing this much time and I know there's likely to be a reward versus let me have a conversation with myself while not making a decision to facilitate my ginormous why that I don't believe that I can ever Frenchie: exactly. Diane: let me just manifest it. Frenchie: Exactly. Exactly. So those really, you know, those three parts start to come together, right? This idea of knowing your why, making decisions, and then staying close to the money. And then from there, as you start to map that out, and as you start to get better on those skills, then you can build this strategy because it's coming from a real place and with a clear direction on the personal level. To make a strategy, you need to be able to make decisions about what you're gonna do and what you're not going to do. And then when you show up to execute it, you really focus on staying close to the money and doing that. So I think this is some of the foundational earlier work that we forget about and then we just dive in. We're like, I need a strategy. But there's a lot of those kind of questions to answer before you dive into that. Diane: Yeah. So if you do this and you build your strategy, then hey, Presto, change o. You manifest your dreams. Frenchie: Exactly. Exactly. It's guaranteed. It's just like that. If it doesn't happen, you're doing it wrong. So it's you and you know, tough shit. No, basically what I think is that, you know, like I mentioned, it starts to ideally, right? It's moving you towards where you want. I. And what that means, and I think this is such an important nuance, is that sometimes that means it's gonna move you a little bit off course for you to get back on course. And sometimes it's gonna move you right on course or on a faster course, right? And we don't always know that. So I think as business owners, our responsibility [00:26:00] is to really learn to read the data and information that our business is giving us so that we can really try and stay on course as much as possible. Diane: Yeah, it's learning to embrace the data and then making an adjustment and then try again, and then embrace the data and make an adjustment. we have this really like straight line relationship with everything in business like. If I do this thing, then these things will happen when the reality is actually like you've gone in circles 17 times before, you've hit that straight line of growth that everyone's talking about all those people with those big whys. if you could only tell every single business owner one thing about growth or marketing in their small business, what would that be? Get really specific about what needle you want to move in your business. Right. I talk a lot about the five core functions of marketing, which are essentially, in my opinion, the five core functions of growth. And people tend to be like, I need to generate leads and nurture my leads and convert them and upsell them and all that. And actually like you really need to take it one step at a time. So get specific about where you wanna see forward momentum, why you wanna see that forward momentum, and then build on that. Yes, all the things at once was never a great recipe for achieving anything much. So with that in mind, is there a lovely little Frenchy resource that we can use to help us? Frenchie: of course there is. so I Diane: earlier. Frenchie: Exactly, exactly. No. So I have a guide called Stay Close to the Money, 37 Stupid Easy Ways to Increase Your Revenue without Being Salesy. And it is essentially a guide that will give you really easy, quick to implement quick win tasks that you can do that are high impact, high reward. And I have a lot of people who've told me they now just kind of keep it by their desk. So if they have 15 minutes between calls or something like that, they just like, look at it. They're like, Hmm. All right. Lemme do one of these. Diane: Yeah, let me, that's like, when you put all your fun activities like into a jar. We should have one that we can just cut up and we put our hand into the [00:28:00] jaw, and then that's the one that we do for the day. So to finish up, I always ask my guests the same two questions. First of all, what is your number one lifestyle boundary for your business? Frenchie: Oh, my number one lifestyle boundary for my business. Nothing is worth losing sleep over. Diane: how good are you at implementing that? Frenchie: I'm pretty good at the, just like, are we at. 80% and it's 10:00 PM It's time. You know? I mean, usually I'm not even working that late, but if I am, because I'm finishing something I am really good at like coming back to the good enough. Diane: Yeah, I'm a huge sleep person. I always have been. I'm a like solid eight hours a night. So that's a, that's a fairly easy one for me. I probably veer on the other side of like, I should do another half hour, but I'm gonna go to bed. Okay. This one might be a bit tougher. What is the worst piece of cookie cutter advice you've been given as an entrepreneur? Frenchie: steal my system. I know that that's like vague, but just, you know, anything that F falls into that bucket is bad advice. Diane: it. Do it. Do as I did. If I can do it, you can do it too. Oh, there's, there's the whole category of Frenchie: Mm-hmm. Diane: that falls into that for sure. Oh, well this has been, So much fun. Where can people find you on the socials so they can carry on the conversation and tell you all the reasons that you're wrong about manifesting? Frenchie: I wanna hear all about it. At Frenchy Rezi on Instagram, that's really where I'm the most active. Diane: Awesome. I look forward to hearing about your dms. Frenchie: I can't wait for the hate mail. Okay, Diane: Thank you so much. Frenchie: thank you.