Lisa Chastain is the #1 Best Selling Author of Girl, Get Your $hit Together, and for over 20 years, Lisa has been coaching, mentoring and advising millennials. From an advisor in higher education to Financial Advisor and as a seasoned life coach, she has learned what it takes to make dreams become reality. Today, as a money coach, she works with women to take control of their finances so that they can be their best in every aspect of their lives.
Lisa has been featured on CNBC, in Fortune, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg Business, Cosmopolitan, and O-The Oprah Magazine, and is on a mission to help women everywhere raise their collective worth so that the world can be a healthier, safer and more loving place to be.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Lisa Chastain about helping women get their sh*t together.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How failure can be positive and lead you towards the right path.
– Why it’s important for entrepreneurs to invest in help and hire a coach.
– How entrepreneurs need to be willing to invest in themselves.
– Why learning about finance is as difficult as studying a foreign language.
– How people need to learn how to spend their money in a way that helps them save their money.
Connect with Lisa:
Links Mentioned:
lisachastain.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@Lisa_Chastain4
Instagram
@lisa_chastain4
Facebook
facebook.com/lisachastain
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/lisachastain
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome everybody, Rob Kosberg here. I have a very exciting guest, someone that you’re going to absolutely love for the Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast. I have Lisa Chastain with us today. Lisa is the number one bestselling author of Girl, Get Your $hit Together. For over 20 years, you have done coaching and mentoring and advising of millennials. You are an advisor in higher education, a financial advisor, seasoned life coach and now you get to focus on helping people as a money coach, especially those that are millennials. I guess your focus is helping women to take control of their finances. You’ve been featured all over CNBC, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, the Oprah Magazine, and now the Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast. I’m intrigued by what you do. I love your title. I think it’s provocative and attention-getting, which a title needs to be. Sometimes you can use foul language just for the use of foul language, but you kind of use it in like, “Hey, that’s the way we talk.” So, congratulations on all that stuff. There’s a lot to talk about, but I want to talk about you and the book and your experience. We were sharing just for a few minutes before we began. You’re pretty vulnerable in the book and you were sharing about how that vulnerability really helps with your clients and with what you do. Let’s start a little bit deeper and then talk a little bit more as far as the nuts and bolts. How have your experiences, the challenges, the things that you faced, led you to this point and what’s the journey been like for you?
Lisa Chastain:
Reflecting on the last 10 years, I could not have imagined 10 years ago that I would be in this place having this conversation with you today. It really was through the challenges of my 30’s, with money, with relationships. Ultimately, I felt like I was like a little baby bird ready to hatch out of my shell. I struggled a lot and I thought I had my life figured out for the most part in my 20s, but it was in my 30s through failure and through self-discovery that I feel like what made me the coach and mentor and business owner that I am today. I titled my book, Girl, Get Your $hit Together because I was literally driving down the freeway. My book did not have a title, I was committed to writing a book. I wanted to share my message about getting our lives together and struggles with money and how to overcome them. I thought, “You know what? I don’t know a woman who doesn’t say that to herself, no matter where she’s at in her life.” We always feel like there’s something that we need to figure out, something we need to do. Just to circle back around with being where I am today, it was through my struggles with money in particular that had I not, I think really hit rock bottom, I wouldn’t be so connected and passionate about the work that I’m doing today.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. You mentioned 10 years ago you couldn’t have imagined yourself doing the things that you’re doing now. Talk me through what the journey’s been like a little bit. I remember massive business failure and it actually led me into the business that I’m in now, at least in a sideways manner. Even though I had so many experiences and successes prior that really kind of rocked my confidence, I just love to hear how you picked yourself back up. What did that process look like for you?
Lisa Chastain:
Well, with the little backstory, at the age of 31, I left my nice cushy, safe government job at UNLV. I was at the highlight of my career. I had climbed the ranks at the university really fast, and I was 10 years younger than any other person in my position on campus. I was burning the candle at both ends so a lot of people can relate to that in your 20s. I went to college; I did all the right things. I got married, I had a kid, I got a mortgage, I got credit card debt. I did all the things you’re supposed to do in your 20s. At 31, I left it all behind. So, it was through the first few years of being a stay at home mom actually that I fell apart. I felt like I had to learn how to walk all over again. The Lisa that existed in her 20s didn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t attached to all those accomplishments, those responsibilities, those accolades, that paycheck. I had to relearn who I was. Through that process, I got a divorce. I lost everything. When I say I lost it, it’s not in a tragic kind of way. I felt like I was watching it happen and it was just slowly outside of my control. I am responsible for that; I don’t blame anybody else for that. What I know now is that I didn’t know what I was doing with my money. I didn’t know how to build a business. I didn’t have mentors in my life that also knew how to support me. That, I think is part of the learning process and that’s what I think I’m on a mission to do now is help people find somebody that they can trust, that they can learn from and to say, “Hey, I made all of these mistakes so I can relate to where you’re at today. I feel your pain.” I felt a lot of pain in my 30s and that leveled me completely to say, “Okay, I don’t have it figured out.” With money in particular, I had to learn a lot of new stuff. I had to learn about the world of money altogether and I had to challenge my own limiting beliefs and my own glass ceiling of what it was to actually earn money. That was a lot of thoughts in once, but I’m going to hand it back to you. I think ultimately I’m where I am today as a result of all the failure in my 30s. That’s what I want my audience to know.
Rob Kosberg:
Did you have somebody that helped you through it? You’ve become the person to help others through it. What did that look like for you when you were in that place?
Lisa Chastain:
Well, the first thing was, I was trying to do it all alone or I thought I was committed to doing it all alone. I decided not to get another job. I decided to be a business owner because I didn’t want to have to answer to the man anymore, right? For me, that was really inspiring. There was a lot of freedom around it, but also, I didn’t know what I was doing. The group that I got involved with, they were all really great at what they did and what they do today. What other people will tell you in the financial industry, there is a lot of sink or swim mentality. Basically, “This is how I did it. Go for it,” and it wasn’t working for me. I was just bleeding money left and right. In 2016, I was at the end of my rope. My ex-husband had been in and out of work at the time, kids they’re not cheap. My savings account of $100,000 was down to $20,000 and I wasn’t making any money. I was really scared, honestly. As a financial advisor at the time, I had been stalking this woman online. I had been watching her material and she sounded like she could help me. She was working with financial advisors to help them turn their businesses around. So, to answer your question, yes someone did help me. Once I learned that I actually had to raise my hand and ask for help and invest in the help, I hired a coach. She’s still my coach today. Everything changed in 2016 when I finally put my money all in and I said, “Okay, help me. Please help me.” She did.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Well, it reminds me of my own journey, but it reminds me of so many other journeys of people that I talk to. We all have two primary resources to work with, our time and our money. The amount of time that you will take to try to figure something out will either far exceed the amount of money that it will cost, far exceed it, or even worse, you may never get there because you give up. You just think, “Well, I’m not cut out for this thing.” That’s a bold move though, to hire a coach with only 20 grand left as a single mom with kids and that’s definitely all in. I congratulate you for that. That had to be difficult.
Lisa Chastain:
She said, “Pay me this,” and I had enough money to live off of for a few months. I gave her the rest. I flew to New Jersey and I was like, “I’m in.” What I love so much about that was that it didn’t make any sense. It was a huge risk and ultimately I was betting on myself. I had enough confidence, I had experienced a ton of failure, but my resolve to figure this out and be successful was there and together with confidence in her ability to help me get it together turned things around very quickly. It took me investing the time, it took me investing the money, and it took me investing in myself to say, “Okay, girlfriend, now’s the time. It’s now or never.” I was not quite through my divorce yet. I actually hadn’t started the divorce process at that time, but I knew in the back of my head that that’s where I was headed. I knew I had to make it work and in 10 months I created a six-figure business.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, you said it, you bet on yourself, you invested in yourself. I’m sure this happens to you as a coach, happens to me all the time. I will have people that want our services, they want us to launch their book, they want us to publish their book, ghostwrite their book, whatever it is, and they say, “Look, if you just do this for me I will pay you after or you can have half.” It’s give me a hamburger today and I’ll pay you for it next Tuesday kind of thing. I always tell them because at one point, my heart goes out to them. At another point, I know this is going nowhere because they’re asking me to invest in them when they aren’t willing to invest in themselves. I try to say that as nicely as I possibly can. Oftentimes there’s offense taken. I say, “Look, if you’re not willing to invest in yourself, then why should I, or anybody be willing to invest in you?” It takes real guts to be able to do that.
Lisa Chastain:
Yeah, I have skin in the game. You got to have skin in the game. If you’re not willing to put your own skin in the game, it’s hard to want something more for someone than they want for themselves. Early in my career, I did some of that work of wanting it more for them, even going without them paying me, which are rookie business owner mistakes. That was exactly the lesson I learned is that people have to be willing to invest in themselves, have the skin in the game. I’ll never forget when my publisher asked me to take the next step with him and publish my book and it was going to cost X amount of dollars. I was driving and I had to pull over because I almost threw up. I knew once I put my money in, I wanted to see that return on investment and I’m not going to put my money behind something that I’m not going to ultimately end up doing and that was so scary.
Rob Kosberg:
Well clearly it worked out well for you so congratulation, but that’s a great story. You know the strength that that gives you, now, I’ve done the same thing and so I completely understand. It’s funny the number of people that you will meet, and I meet that have a very similar story when they had to invest in themselves. The cool thing is the confidence that gives you to let people know, “Hey, this is what it is to work with me. I did it myself. I’m not asking you to do something that I myself wasn’t willing to do. This was the result that I got. It’s the result that you can get too.” It gives you great confidence I imagine.
Lisa Chastain:
It gives me confidence and hope. Hope for them that if they’re willing to invest in their time and money, that they will get the result. Going back to what you had said earlier about the shortcuts; that’s why I believe a great coach gives the value in saying, “Hey, we made these mistakes, we’ve done these things let us help you shortcut the time, the energy, the money.” When I look at all the money that I’ve invested, I mean I took out all of the money that I had in my 401k to support myself to figure this stuff out. On top of that, I have invested thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars, so why wouldn’t you make the choice just like for you? Why wouldn’t you make the choice to shortcut some of that and save yourself a ton of time and money because we want that for you?
Rob Kosberg:
I talk to people often about my million-dollar mistake when I was coming off my business failure in 2007. I owned three real estate companies that were doing over 100 million a year in transactions. It went to zero and I was advised by a couple of mentors that if I’m going in a new direction, I should write a book. That rang true to me at the time to build my kind of foundation on the book. Long story short, I hired a ghostwriter, it was a terrible experience. I tried all of these things and it ended up taking me about 18 months to do it. Immediately, the first year after that at, and this was 2009, so economy is still in the dumps, but I did over a million dollars and then multi millions thereafter all from my book. I call it my million-dollar mistake. If I could have just shortcut that 18 months, I was willing to write a check. I couldn’t find anybody to write a check that could really help, that’s part of the reason I started my business, but that I guess business out of necessity is really beneficial. I imagine that there’s an element of that with what you’re doing. You have the whole thing, you have the experience, you have the passion, you have the commitment because you walk through the whole process yourself. I mean what better way than to get coached by somebody that has all of those kinds of principles. I guess I’m not even asking a question. I’m just praising you for doing what you do, but I just think that’s why go anywhere else at the same time I’m sure you see people do and they have to make their own commitment in their own time. So talk to me if you would, Lisa, about your magic for just a few minutes. You serve, it’s primarily women and millennials that are experiencing some of the same things you experienced. What are your steps to success? What’s the process that you take them through? Talk me through that.
Lisa Chastain:
Well, my client has what I would describe as a low financial IQ. They’re very bright, they’re very successful in their own way, it’s just that somewhere in their lifetime, they never got the education or the learning that they needed to understand finance. The way I describe it, it really is like learning a foreign language if you don’t know the language of finance. I think that’s very intimidating. So, in my world, the very first thing that we do is just start with a very simple, very, very casual conversation about money. I don’t take for granted that my clients got the basics. For so many of them, they just got the school of hard knocks when it comes to money. We start with setting a really solid foundation of how to actually look at your money so that you can make decisions with it. I would say that for the first six months to a year that’s what we’re working on with our clients. One is money mindset so that they have the confidence that they actually can have whatever it is they say they want financially, that they can invest, but we can’t start there. We have to make sure that they understand, “Okay, do you know what you are making, what you’re spending and what you’re keeping every single month? It’s that simple. We don’t start with budgets. We start with very simple foundational tools, we build from there. The next step then is just teaching them how to save. I know that getting out of debt is a huge, huge challenge for millennials in particular, but really Americans. I can’t even start with getting out of debt because I have to teach them how to save. Then, once they learn how to save and actually hold onto money, they have to learn how to spend their money in a way that helps them save their money. Then we can talk about getting out of debt and then all of the other magical pieces of money that come with it, like investing in cryptocurrency. People tend to want to start with that stuff because that’s what the industry is talking about all day long and I’m saying, “Hey, back up.” The magic in our world is we’re going to keep it simple. We have this test, it’s a 10-question test and it is available on my website. Most people who take the test score in 30 to 40% or lower when they start with us. They’re saying, “I don’t track my money, I don’t have an abundant mindset, I don’t really know what I’m doing, I don’t talk about money.” By the time they graduate in our world, they’re scoring 80 to 90% on that test because they’ve built the foundation.
Rob Kosberg:
Let’s change gears for a minute and talk about the book, but not so much the book and how it’s helped others. We’ve talked about that. Let’s talk about how the book’s helped you. You wrote that with a purpose and oftentimes hopefully the purpose is dual fold. It’s “I want to help others, but I want this book also to help my cause, my business,” whatever. Talk to me about how your book has helped you to grow your authority. Are there any specific stories around attracting of clients, et cetera?
Lisa Chastain:
Well, I will be honest with you. When my coach told me that I had to write a book I told her, no. It was actually her and her husband, but I said, “Lisa, if you really want to get your message out faster and more powerful, we know you have something that you want to accomplish, a book is going to be a great way to do that.” I had on a vision board, maybe five, 10 years before that written down that I was going to be an author, but I never thought it was going to actually happen. I didn’t want to write a book, but the compelling reason behind it, as you know, was to build a business and to help people. I knew it would be a great way to get the message out. So the journey for me was very scary and kind of like a baby giraffe, because I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was willing to invest and I was willing to hire the right people. When the book came together, the first thing I started doing was interviewing people to say, “Hey, do you want to be in this book? Can I interview you to use your stories, to use what I learned from you to incorporate into my book.” It was really cool as I put the message out there I said, “Hey, I’m writing a book can I interview you,” and from there, my business started to take on a new form because women were saying, “Not only can you interview me but, can you help me?”
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. So, in the creation of your book, you we’re actually making money by attracting clients and creating content at the same time. That is a great, very, very brilliant way to do it.
Lisa Chastain:
Thank you. So, the women that are in my book are women who joined my sister mentorship at the time. Their stories are in my book. SISTERS stand for Strong, Independent, Successful, Talented, Empowered for Results. For a year or two, we all worked together and my group programs many of them got out of debt. They bought homes, they went through divorces or found new, healthier relationships, if they didn’t go through divorce. You don’t have to go through divorce if you become my world, I promise. It’s not necessary, but they saved themselves from bankruptcies. With that my business grew to something that I wouldn’t ever imagine it to be today. The highlight was being on CNBC and they featured the entire title of my book. I thought that was pretty cool. It’s like, “Hey, I don’t know if CNBC would’ve ever done something like that, but I’m really grateful because I had the courage to write a book and I don’t know if I would’ve even been on CNBC, had I not done that.” So, the accolades, being at Oprah Magazine, those things are pretty cool, but really building a six-figure business very quickly in 10 months and I haven’t slowed down. Seeing all of my clients now live lives they love, that’s for me was worth all the struggle and the tears and the investment in writing the book.
Rob Kosberg:
Lisa, thank you. Where can we direct people? Where’s the best place for people to learn more about you, maybe learn about your program, of course, get a copy of your book, et cetera?
Lisa Chastain:
Sure, lisachastain.com and as soon as you go to the front page, there’s a get started or start here link and you can take that test. Then well, you can reach out to us from there and figure out how we can support you.
Rob Kosberg:
Fantastic. Lisa, thank you. So, lisachastain.com for anybody interested. The test sounds really intriguing. I want to go take it, but I don’t think I qualify as a client so, I don’t know maybe you take male clients as well, but it certainly sounds intriguing. Thanks for being on today and great to have you on the podcast.
Lisa Chastain:
Thank you and thank you for the work that you do.
