Becoming Spiritual

I wrote this bio for a presentation to my BNI group.

Alicia Eichmann is a Marketing Consultant and Business Coach who partners with small business owners to grow their business and build their professional brand. Alicia believes that your vision truly matters, that your company is poised to make a difference, and that you already have the genius, discipline, and creativity inside of you, that with a little guidance is ready and waiting to come out and catapult your business to the next level.

She has worked with a variety of small to medium-sized businesses on marketing and strategic planning, including Stikwood, More Salt Please, Fit Realty, Feather Photography, Mom Inspired Show, The Ron Sawyer Team, Lifeforming Leadership Coaching, Natural Soap Mom, A1-American, Transforming Love Ministries, R + A Creative, Crafty Life Mom, Rising Birch Healing, Mission Springs Resort, Local Holistic Guide, One Autoimmune Journey, Wheeling to Dream, and Soul Adventure.

From podcasts and youtube channels, to airbnb owners and real estate teams, to therapists and fitness instructors, to life coach trainers and mastermind leaders, Alicia has helped these small business owners to get clarity on their personal and professional goals, identify a growth plan they love, and make consistent progress in the midst of the challenges of ordinary and entrepreneurial life. Her professional superpowers are knowing what needs to be done, and helping you get out of your own way.

Alicia has a masters degree in Biblical Literature from Regent University and is licensed as a Growth Coach with Lifeforming Leadership Coaching. She has 9 years experience as a Marketer at SimonHouses.com, and 3 years experience as a Research Assistant for an internationally recognized New Testament scholar. After school she took time off to have kids and began learning websites and coding with help from her husband. This turned into a marketing-focused job that she was able to do mostly from home for several years while raising small children.

Alicia is at heart a writer, researcher and coach who stumbled into marketing. She used to question at times both her degree (and resulting student loans) and her foray into marketing and advertising, but then discovered the power of combining marketing, business and mindset to help small family-based business owners to be successful.

Born and raised in Kansas City, she loves being in Hampton Roads and relatively close to both the ocean and the mountains. Alicia and her husband, Charles, have four boys ages 9, 7, 4 and 2. Her long held dream to homeschool them is currently coming true because of her business.

She is a big fan of the legacy Star Wars movies and books and has yet to see the new movies. She collects the girl-themed Legos that come in pink, purple and turquoise, and her most prized possession is her library of books. Her dream side hustle is to start a Leadership Book Club and review site, where she’d write and talk about all the fascinating business, psychology, marketing, and personal development books she’s constantly reading.

Of course there is more, but here is what stands out to me right now:

My kids need me – During this season I’ve been gone 9-6 and I can tell that they need to see more of me. I’m grateful to be able to switch back roles from primary breadwinner to part time working my business. I knew what I was doing was for our family and the kids but it was interesting to see how quickly it began to wear on them and how much better it is for the little guys for me to work from home and be present.

I don’t like being an employee anymore – Working so many hours for one client for the past month pulled on my brain toward an employee mindset. I was able to work and function as a consultant and provide value from an outside perspective, but I could still feel the pull back to my old employee mindset, even in the just the lack of urgency and time to find new clients. And while I enjoyed the work, I had that feeling that it was starting to pull me away from my path.

I love doing consulting – It’s my zone of genius, I feel like I keep trying to do more and other stuff and I can’t help it, I keep getting drawn back. I need to work on how to package it and network with biz connections who I can refer clients to for the actual work.

Right now my husband needs a traditional job – This is what he needs right now, and I have so much peace about it. Some day he may join me in my business fully, but right now he needs some structure, some validation, and some professional career development. And to not be at home watching kids during the day.

Every week business people meet at networking groups – They have all kinds of different roles and business models, and I’ve met the most wonderful people attending some local networking groups this month. This is the hardest part about potentially moving across town.

People are wonderful – This is more of a takeaway from the past year, but I’ve found that the average person I meet is both incredibly talentrf, wonderfully gracious, and incredibly interesting to get to know.

God is real – My faith has been strengthened like never before. I’ve seen and felt the divine presence throughout the past year and I see it clearer as my path becomes clearer, guiding me toward the path and then helping me find it.

I have a path, a life work – I’m having this increasing sense, and belief, that I have a life work, that is set, that is there for me to discover and live out. It is something that I both create and discover simultaneously, in a fascinating life purpose paradox.

I should separate my interests into two separate websites and businesses – I’ve let myself get busy with life, but this is the breakthrough of clarity I needed. Now it seems I’ve got to do some more mindset work and free up my time to finish implementing both and get to where I can just schedule time to write for both.

I know how to make money – It’s been incredibly freeing and enlightening to learn how to network and find clients. People enjoy working with me and hiring, and I enjoy having a business budget and being able to hire them too.

My husband won’t stay unemployed very long – I was right, he’s amazing.

Lyft provides a valuable service for drivers and riders – Charles has come home with the most fascinating stories, and it’s given him such a valuable sense of perspective during this season, and an opportunity to serve others.

 Charles was let go due to downsizing last week. It was really unexpected and a lot to process over the weekend. But we’re emerging with one dominant thought: this is our opportunity to rewrite our story.

He and I have had a theory for awhile that people have stories that they tell themselves about their life. These are usually created subconsciously as we grow up and experience the world. Every adult has a story they’re living that was created based on their past experiences. And we believe it and live it out dutifully until something changes it. I believe anyone can choose to change their story and embrace the power of doing so to reinvent their life. It all starts with changing your thinking. What you think determines how you feel, and your thoughts and emotions create your inner reality, which you then produce as your external reality.

I read a book over the holidays by Dr. Caroline Leaf, called Who Switched Off My Brain? The title doesn’t do justice to the book. In it she goes through methodically and lays out the science for how your thoughts actually create the structure of your brain and determine your reality.

Changing your thoughts has the ability not only to change what you think and do, but also the physical health of the systems in your body. She also talks about how it’s actually a real, healthy thing to listen to your heart or to listen to your gut. My two practical takeaways from the book, beyond the importance of thought in general, was to listen to my heart and to talk to myself out loud.

We had thought about making a change for awhile, but loyalty and stability were keeping us where we were, even though we knew we had outgrown it and that we longed for something more, something new and different, more in line with the vision that has been growing in our hearts for the past few years.

So now we’ve got so much freedom, it’s scary.

But we’re embracing it and being open. That’s why we’re going to put our house on the market, and apply for jobs across the country. We might end up staying here but for us this season about being open – including to the new and unexpected, about dreaming, about writing a new Story together for our family. And it’s going to take a lot of effort to change our story, to shift our identity, to let the old one die and a new one take shape.

But it’s going to be a joyful journey, the only one for me that has any draw. You know you’re really on your way when the old story begins to wilt before the new one has fully taken shape. That’s the feeling of being pushed out of the nest. When nothing in the big scary future is as scary as staying where you’ve been, that’s the sweet spot to learn to fly.

I love the way Bo Eason talks about how to share a story from your past in an effective way. What I’m talking about here is how to tell yourself a Story about your future in order to determine the script that you are going to be living out. But I believe the story of your past is one you should learn to capture and tell in a way that allows you to connect with an audience, convey your values, and impart truth on an emotional level.

And then what I think is really exciting is the story of transition. It sits between the story of your past which we can choose to view with a redemptive or grateful perspective, and the story of your future which is what you visualize and imagine in detail in order to get your brain thinking about how to get you from here to there. Your future story is full of goals and dreams and aspirations, of the person you want to be, the life you want to live, the impact you want to make.

In order to change your story, you’ve got to sit in that tenuous place of transition, where you mine your past for clues until you find your true purpose and identity, you project those into the future, creating an image and a Vision that feels larger than life. When you get that amazing gut reaction of recognition that makes you cry with joy that you’ve found something you’ve lost, that you can feel in your body was your truth, your mission, your destiny. When you find that feeling, you’ve accomplished this step of digging below your surface story to find the one thread you need to follow to create a new one that is really YOU, truly Your Story.

And when you find that, you’ll journal and write affirmations and do a vision board, you’ll do everything that helps you to capture that compelling vision of the future, that Story that resonates with your gut. And you’ll become determined to grow into it.

And then when you have that, you’re ready (you’ll constantly question whether you are ready, but you are), you’re ready to walk out in your day to day life, right NOW, the craziness that will be the work of living in your old reality and doing the work of folding your new future reality into it slowly, so that you methodically transform your life from old to new.

This requires you to keep your vision, the image of your future constantly on your mind, and to know in your soul that it is your new and true reality. The real trick here is to marry practicality and faith in a way where you do the responsible things in the here and now that you need to do, while holding the Story you have created about your future and your new reality as a Truth in your mind that you will carry with you until it becomes your reality.

That journey is where I’m at, and I’ll have to judge how much to share, but I feel compelled to share my journey with you through this season to help you see that it is possible to change your Life and your Story, and to provide both an emotional example to build your faith, and also some practical ways to walk that line of faith and practicality.

I’ll tell you right now, that God will put the right people in your life. When you need someone in this role, just look and they will already be there.

I see now that my husband is the practicality that balances out my positivity, and seeing this reaffirms in just another way that we are truly equipped and called to walk this journey together.

I’m working consistently to cultivate a crazy dream of where I know he and I have always wanted to go as a family. The more I visualize and embrace that mental path, the more I walk it back and forth in my morning routine, the more it takes shape and starts to become real.

But then when my husband is successfully driving Lyft less than 48 hours after being let go, that helps me see that I should accept most or all of the money making opportunities that I have right now to work with clients, instead of overthinking which ones best fit the big vision I’m creating – while at the same time mining my experiences to see the thread that will guide me forward, so that as I go forward and do have the opportunity to focus and choose, I will know which clients to take on or to continue working with.

With so much sudden freedom, and openness to change, and financial instability, faith and joy have been present, but clarity has been elusive.

But thinking of my current situation in terms of navigating faith and practicality helps me to see the way forward, and reminds me to lean on my husband to balance me out, knowing that between our temperaments, in our joint decisions will lie the way forward.

Have you thought about your life as a story?

You have a script that you believe about your life, and if you don’t like where it’s taken you, you have the opportunity to mine it for the good, for the nuggets that will point the way forward, and then to embark on the journey of rewriting your script, changing direction, forging a new path.

My main caution in that is to not do it too quickly or rashly, go slow enough to stay in alignment with your values, to act out of love rather than fear, and to prioritize the relationships in your life that are integral to your journey. When you focus on love and service, rather than fear or hurt, you will find your true way forward.

I’m going to homeschool my kids this fall.

Sometimes you get to the point in life where you’re just not willing to do things you don’t feel good about anymore. That was me this past summer and so I quit my job.

And you know what? The world didn’t end. It’s been hard work, the emotional and mental work of switching to an entrepreneurial mindset, and especially of getting rid of limiting beliefs has been intense. But I’ve found I was able to do it, and I did. And it was nothing compared to the prospect of staying where I was.

And guess what I’ve found? When you start listening to your gut, and following your heart, and rejecting the notion that you have to listen to all the external ‘coulds’ and ‘shoulds’ and fears that keep you miserable and stuck – when you’re just not willing anymore, and then you start carving your own path? That’s addictive. I’m discovering my own power. And when you realize you can make decisions and design the life you want, that is a positive addiction of the best kind.

When you chart a path upstream, at first you only see the current that is set against you, but as you gain momentum you find your own strength, as you gain traction and make progress you realize the current carries downriver those who do not exert their own will, but that when you do apply your strength and will, the whole river opens up. It is equally willing to take you anywhere that you determine to go.

You have a unique path. There is destiny inside of you. Do you hear the voice telling you to head upstream? I believe we all have one.

I’m here to tell you to follow that voice. Use your muscles, exert your will, discover your own internal power.

Too many of us are asleep, and do not realize the control we do have, the choices we could make. We are in a box of our own construction, using a handbook that was not written with our best interests in mind. And we have a learned helplessness that tells us we are stuck, when we are not.

This was the year I decided to rewrite my story, chart my own path, follow my heart, pick a new handbook.

And so I quit my job, started my own business, made new friends, hired a coach, took courses, went to a conference on the other side of the country, found clients, journaled a ton (ie. listened to my heart), let my business model morph until I found the right thing for me, started coaching, found new clients, replaced my income in 3 months, got a massage, hired a housecleaner, bought way fewer presents for Christmas, started networking with local businesses, found more potential clients. Next I’m going to get my business stabilized with a good foundation, keep listening to my heart, and prepare to homeschool in the fall. Because now I realize that I can, and my heart is telling me that’s the path for me and my boys.

It’s a process, starting to listen to your heart. You can’t change everything at once.

I have had to choose my priorities. I’ve known for awhile that the first two would be quitting my job and preparing to homeschool.

As far as decisions go, those two have been easy, they’ve been on my heart for awhile. But quitting itself was a clearly defined action I could take and mark down as successful. Creating my own business has been tricker because there are so many options and decisions to make. As I’ve attempted to set professional goals for this year it’s been really hard, I think simply because it’s taking time to be honest with myself. I’m so used to shutting down my hopes and dreams, I’ve got them all locked up deep inside.

You know what brings them out the fastest? Working with clients.

Working with amazing men and women who are ready to do the work, to chart their path in the world, and just need some support.

They are on the same path that I am, and I’ve found that working with them illuminates things in my own heart. Ministering to them ministers to my own soul.

One of my clients is launching a membership on autoimmune disease, to provide her tribe with good information and a supportive community, while giving her financial freedom in the process. Helping her is awakening a desire to start my own affordable membership as a way to start teaching and sharing more content on a topic that is difficult to monetize.

Another client established an online marketing presence, and then when took the time to slow down and listen to her heart, and realized she wanted to spend less time online and on social, and more time networking locally. So we adjusted and created a new marketing plan for this quarter that uses that foundation, but aims her toward her goal of connecting locally and starting a locally based business.

Over the past few months my single biggest privilege has been when I hear my clients get to the point of voicing their big dreams. For the one with the membership, it was quitting her job that’s affecting her health, for a second it was opening her own boutique fitness studio, for a third it is finding marketing clients who are special needs moms with businesses, who are also actively supporting the special needs community. In marketing it can be so hard to niche down, but there is so much power in identifying a group that aligns with your personal mission and serving it with focused effort. For two other clients who are marriage and family therapists, one is a bestselling author who is working toward shifting from a time-intensive personal practice to a career more focused on speaking and teacher. The other is younger and single, is currently leaving her job, and has so many big dreams I’m not sure which one will be first. One is an idea for a podcast that I can’t share because it is her idea to pursue when the time is right. But it’s a big idea that represents a big dream and has a lot of passion behind it.

And working with those two clients have stirred so many big dreams in my heart around speaking and writing, and helping people with emotional and mental aspects of life not far removed from the topic of relationships.

I want to teach my kids to follow their dreams. To be ready to be creative, develop character, serve people, work hard – and then to follow their heart and pursue a big dream. I want them to know that money is neither good nor bad, but simply a very useful, strategic tool to be used to help them live the life they want to create. And that with commitment and dedication, they can make money doing whatever they choose to pursue.

My oldest is 8 ½ and he’s decided he wants to design video games. He’s already using Scratch to learn basic programming skills and create basic video games. He and I have recently started reading Hardy Boys books together, and soon we’re going to also read Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by Adam Alter. This is a book I read last year that explains the different aspects of video games and how the way they are designed affects our experience. I want my son to understand more fully the effects his games have on him, and to start thinking about how he would craft a game to create the experience he thinks players should have.

Looking back at my formative years, I see that school was not designed to foster my dreams but to prepare me to sit in a box and dutifully float downriver.

I don’t intend to be harsh, I am so incredibly grateful for everything I’ve learned in the past almost 36 years of life. But I have come to realize that there is a whole other way to live life that I have only just started to explore, and that on that path lies my destiny.

This blog this year will be an invitation for you to join me as I head upstream. Although it is uncharted territory, I am going to be learning from those who have trod that path, and sharing my thoughts here with you.

To a glorious, magnificent 2019 that blows all of our current dreams away…

Alicia

For more on my personal journey and thoughts about homeschooling, check out this blog post from earlier this year: Life is not a Classroom

I spent a year investing too much time, money and energy trying to figure out this whole online biz world, and then everything I had learned finally clicked, and I quit my job and replaced my income within 90 days.

In reflecting on everything I’ve learned through this experience, I came up with a list of things that I would tell a close friend right now if they asked me what I’ve learned that could help them.

What I hope to do here is share some wisdom to anyone who is where I was last year, or anyone who feels overwhelmed by all the options and pitches they see everywhere for courses and programs about marketing and online business. I’m telling you now because I wish someone would have been honest and told me these truths about online business a year ago.

I want to save you some time, give you some hope, and probably get some interesting conversations going.

Okay, here are 8 things I wish someone could have told me last year:

1. People who need to make money shouldn’t make blogging their core activity. There are two kinds of people that blogging is great for, and it’s not the person who needs to make money in the next 3-6, or even 9 months. For more on this, check out the YouTube video I just posted about it: The Honest Truth about Blogging.

2. All you need to make money is Dubsado, Stripe, Zoom, and Calendly, and all four are free to get started. I made up this system, and used it to replace my income. For the details on this strategy, check out my video: The Honest Truth about How to Make Real Money Online.

3. If you know you’ll want to get into courses, products, and memberships and build email funnels, it’s worth it to start with Kajabi instead of WordPress. I started with WordPress, a pile of plugins, Teachable, LeadPages, and Drip, and then did more research and replaced all of them with Kajabi, it saves me a ton of time, costs the same, is built for mobile, and positions you to scale your business once you are ready.

4. If you want to start making real money soon, spend 0% of your time on affiliate promotions, links, strategies, etc. At this stage in your business, your time is just seriously way too valuable and your network is too small.

5. Spend a ton of time networking and talking to people, until you figure these things out: who you are and what you do, how you can best provide value, and who needs that from you and will pay you for it.

6. The only daily habit you absolutely need is journaling. I cannot overstate the importance in entrepreneurship of learning to listen to yourself and to recognize, own and prioritize your own voice. It can be astonishingly hard to figure out who you are and what you want, and then to deal with all the mental obstacles that come up as you take bold and courageous steps to go where you’ve never gone before. Journaling helps you with all of this, and more. Just do it, start NOW.

7. There is no one size fits all formula, but all you need is the one strategy that is right for you. That, and the discipline to focus on it. In order to have the right strategy, and stick to it and fight your inner demons, you need wisdom, accountability, and mindset support, and that’s where coaching comes in.

8. Invest in a coach instead of a bunch of courses. This is the biggest mindset shift that took me a long time to realize. You think you can’t afford to spend money on a person and their opinion, and you think you need more information. But the opposite is actually true. You have nearly everything you need already inside you. You don’t need anymore information. The only thing you do need is the right coach. The best investment you can make is in the right person to support and guide you on your journey, in focus, discipline, and strategy, as well as in mindset and shifting your thoughts and beliefs.

This is part of the reason that I’ve decided to focus as a marketer on offering coaching, because I believe that one-on-one coaching is truly the best service I can offer, and the best investment you can make, to change your life and help you take the next big step in your business, whether that is getting off the ground, finding your next few clients, or even creating a course if that is the right way for you to serve your audience.

 I want to help you identify the one idea that has the most potential to change your life in the next 90 days, and then coach you through the process of accomplishing it.

If you’re interested in that, let’s get on a free discovery call and chat about it: https://calendly.com/alicia-eichmann/discovery-call.

This post has affiliate links, which means I may make a small commission if you follow the link and make a purchase. This is always at no additional cost to you. I’m so grateful for your support. Learn more here.

Here is some of what I’m up to, and what I recommend for you to try this week:

Hey there!

It’s Monday! Are you excited? Monday has taken on a whole new sense of excitement and potential for me, so I decided to move my newsletter day to Monday. I hope I can help equip and motivate you in a few small ways for whatever you’re up to in your business this week.

Quick question: would you like a free tool that will make your analytics account talk to you in plain English? That was what I was aiming for with my new freebie.

I’ve created a free custom dashboard and mini email course as my first opt-in and of course I want you to be the first to have it. If you worked with me this summer I tried to add it to your account already, but it will only show if you gave me Collaborate access, and not just Read and Analyze access.

Anyway, click below to get the link to add the dashboard to your account, and also get the 10 week email series. It will send one email a week with a 15 min exercise on how to use one of the widgets on your dashboard to learn something useful about your site traffic.

[This resource is no longer available.]

Here is a list of some of what I’ve been up to, and things I recommend for you to try this week:

1. Expand Your Upper Limit – I’ve been rereading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I’m fascinated by his theory that we all have an upper limit to our happiness, and that we can identify and remove limiting beliefs and greatly increase our capacity to be happy. One practical tip is that whenever you find yourself worrying, try to rechannel that thought and emotion into excitement instead. For me that means, instead of worrying about where my next clients are coming from, I’m excited to discover where I find them.
   
   
2. Slow down to go faster – I’m still questioning the wisdom of it, but I took all day Friday to look at the big picture of my business plan, and think about why I’m doing it, who I want to help, that kind of thing. It was all mind maps, paper, index cards, and markers and minimal time on the computer. I put the highlights up on my wall that my desk faces. It was quite refreshing, but I found myself questioning this weekend whether I should have been more ‘productive’. But what good is working hard if you don’t find clarity first. Anyway, if you need clarity on the action you’re taking, I recommend slowing down before you speed up.
   
   
3. Live in Einstein Time – This is basically about managing your energy. You know how you can dread a task and take way longer than necessary to do it? Or you can have a lightbulb moment and then knock out a task in a quarter of the time you thought it would take? Realize that your perception of a task effects how you use time, and use that to your advantage. This is why it is wise to focus as much time as possible on tasks that you love and are good at. One of my goals is to get to a place where I can spend some time every day in the ‘flow’, doing something that for me is creative and productive, where the process itself is beautiful, and the result feels inspired. (I read this idea in The Big Leap.)
   
   
4. You are not your Ego – If you don’t know what this means, you should read some of the books by Jen Sincero and Gabrielle Bernstein. This concept has been so helpful to me. I am not my fear, or my lack mentality, or anything else holding me back from my future. I am separate from those things and can choose to leave them behind. And so can you. (I’m currently rereading You Are a Badass at Making Money. If the title turns you off a bit, I understand. But get over it and read it. And do all the exercises, and then read it again. And then you’ll be where I’m at and we can have our own personal book club talking about how we’re ready to move forward with our lives, let the past go, become the awesome people we need to be to create the lives we want, etc.)
5. Remember, Done is Better Than Perfect – Or at least that’s what they say. It sounds good, it’s easy to put up on my vision wall, until I have this freebie that I’ve finished twice and am thinking maybe it’s too this or that and I should make more changes first. But no, I’ve got to start shipping things. So if you check out the dashboard above, you’ll get the first email immediately, and I’m wondering if once a week is spaced too far apart, but I thought that would make it really doable. And I could turn the emails into a workbook, but this makes it more timely, more of an experience. So let me know what you think.
   
   
6. DIY Your Branding with Me – So hopefully third time is a charm, but now I’m doing branding all over again, for aliciaeichmann.com. I found Sarah Masci this summer and was so grateful for the useful information in her free challenges that I joined her membership, Simple Brand Academy, and am using that to do my own branding.
   
   
7. Explore Alexa Skills – I found a company that does Alexa Skills, and am going to make my own Alexa Flash Briefing. Let me know if you’re interested in making one too and I’ll give you the info. There is a great opportunity to get in at the front of what is going to be a big trend with Voice technology.
   
   
8. Be bold – Have a marvelous week and put something on your schedule today that scares you just a bit, but would take your biz, or your soul (or both!) to the next level. Do something that makes you feel alive.

Quote of the Week

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

– Howard Thurman

Blessings,
Alicia