Someone I have always looked up to is Erin King! She is an author, 3x entrepreneur, and international keynote speaker. I’ve been #girlcrushing on her. I saw her speak in person, and she inspired me to grow in my own entrepreneurial journey. She inspired me to change the hearts and minds of others through the power of the word.
Read our amazing chat below!
Kimberly: Here is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my entire life. Erin King. Welcome.
Erin: Hi Kimberly, how are you?
Kimberly: I’m obviously super pumped to have you here. So excited.
Erin: What an intro girl. My head is just exploding with all this love. Molly, Karen, Julie, Vicky, RubyKay, Melissa, Tyra, Kimberly, Lindsay. I see all of you. This is so exciting.
Kimberly: Yes, absolutely. And y’all also, don’t forget our rule to share this with a friend. She does a ton of training for network marketers, direct sellers, etc. I know many of you have teams share this information with your team so that they can maybe meet Erin for the first time or see her again. So Erin, tell everyone a bit of you. What caught you into entrepreneurship?
Erin: Oh my gosh. Well, Kimberly, thank you so much for bringing me in for your incredible event. I mean, the countdown is on, and as someone who has worked in the live events business, my entire career putting on your own event is no joke. So I just want to say kudos to you for getting your team together, bringing the vision, and getting the vibe.
Erin: My story is like many of us, I was not a great employee. I didn’t like being told what to do. I didn’t do well with the box, the form, and the checking of the boxes. When I was 22 years old, I worked for a local television station in Baltimore, Maryland. I was up for a promotion against a guy named James, and I had better sales. This is my moment. I am going to get promoted. Well, James played golf with the boys club. So who do you think got the promotion? So I went full-on, Jerry McGuire. I just quit. It was very dramatic. I just jumped from corporate America. Terrible idea. Right? I had no experience and got into debt. I ended up going back to corporate America; no shame in that game. But If you’re going to play it, you have to play the long game.
Erin: You don’t want to be hopping in and out. I got some experience running digital marketing for a fortune 500 company here in Southern California. I took what I learned there and started my second venture called pms.com. We were called the tampon fairies because we magically delivered period prep monthly. I was always the girl in the stall to ask if I could borrow some products. It turns out this was a terrible idea because most women are responsible adults. So that’s somebody 18 months after raising capital from a bunch of Newport Beach alpha males holding up a tampon in a boardroom; we crashed and burned after we featured in Forbes. I was back to square one again.
Erin: So finally, my third venture, which I started from my kitchen table with one client, ended up growing it to working with some of the world’s biggest brands like the Oscars in Hollywood and the United States Navy at the Pentagon. After a very rocky 10 years of highs and lows, wins and losses, and blood, sweat, and tears, we were finally acquired by a company here in Southern California.
Kimberly: Congratulations, that’s like next level!
Erin: Everyone sees the fun part right now: writing books and going to fun events. But let me tell you, it has not been all rainbows. There have been a lot of thunderstorms and a lot of hard one lessons, but I hope to spend time with your Goal Digger community; I can share a little bit about what I’ve learned even over the last two years. I’ve learned about reinvention, getting back up, and trying to be sort of okay with rediscovering ambition. Also, how to sort of move away from living small. There’s just been so much small happening.
Erin: First, we had to be smaller in our space. Then we had to be smaller with who we got to hang out with, and we had to be smaller with what we could plan for or look forward to; everything just got so small. As we turned inward, I think we just kind of got into that survival mode of small inwardness. Now I feel we’re coming out on the other end of this thing hopefully, pretty soon; we will figure out how to be big again. We have to figure out how to expand on our joy, goals, and ambition. Rediscover who we are, not who we were, and find that person again.
Kimberly: Yes. Amen. I’m just like, I’m ready to go when you’re talking; it fires me up so much. I was stalking you after the second time I saw you. And I said to myself I’ve just got to meet her. So I messaged you, and you said you had already left. So I guess I’ll just plan a conference and ask her to be the keynote so I can meet her.
Erin: Well, there are easier ways for us to hang out. (Erin laughs)
Kimberly: We’ll meet each other and hug it out. At our Like A Gold Digger Conference in September, she’s going to do something really special. She’s going to do a private book signing meet and greet. We have our photographer that will be there. Everyone who grabs a gold or platinum ticket for the conference gets Erin’s book. So buy it now! Then you can give the other one away. You get her new book, “You Are Kind Of A Big Deal.” This book will prepare you and set the stage for when you get to see her on the stage. So for those of you who want to get the momentum now and are done playing small, you will like this book.
Kimberly: So Erin, tell us a little bit about your journey. As far as I don’t hear, stop, go stop, go from you at all. A lot of these women struggle with that. Like they get excited, and they take their foot off the gas and get inconsistent. I don’t hear that from you at all. I feel like when things didn’t work for you, you always asked what’s next? Was that really how it was for you, or did you have pauses? How did you mentally keep going?
Erin: Well, you know, I will say this, Kimberly, with your business and running your team, the last two years have been no joke. And for me, I tend to be a binary thinker. I’ll just admit it. I understand life’s about balance and the gray, but I just love a good A or B option. I’m either eating pizza, or I’m eating kale. Like I don’t do balance. So for me, when the pandemic hit, I was like, we are all on one of two teams right now. We are on team wait, or we are on team create. We can either wait, sit around, wait for the download, wait for someone else to figure it out, or wait for the vaccine. Just wait, wait, wait. Or we can be on team create. We can control the only controllable that we have and how we show up to our community.
Erin: So I just began to create my way out of despair and create my way out of panic. When I lost all my speaking revenue, which is 90% of my business is speaking revenue, it was really hard to get hired. Luckily, I had these virtual gigs, and I felt very duplicitous. I had the mask. I was putting forth to the world which is the highlight reel. But then, behind the scenes, we were creating. We launched a new website, wrote a new book, a new email, podcasts, and all this stuff. I just kept going to avoid the feelings. Not saying that’s the healthiest way, but that’s how I did it.
Erin: So what I found through that year was as I kept creating, I was so focused on work that I think each one of us had a download from the universe during this grand reset. And my download came in fast and furious. I had about 10 years of pain, grief, and drama download on me in a six-month time period. I had my eight-month-old puppy. That was the love of my life. My pandemic bestie puppy. I’m not a human mama. So she was the only experience I’ve ever had of being a mother. Well, she got hit by a car in front of me, and she died in my arms. It was the darkest time. We ended up serendipitously getting her sister, Ms. Betty White, which is a whole other story.
Erin: So during the same period of this darkness, my dad got diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, my mom got melanoma, my husband bet against the stock market because he thought there was no way it would keep going up in a pandemic. We lost millions with an M amount of dollars because of the boost in the economy. So on top of this beautiful podcast, my speaking, and my book behind the scenes, it was a show. Each one of us has those stories in the pandemic, and it just came a moment.
Erin: I would say probably about nine months ago when I was out walking on the beach, and I just held out my hands. I don’t know what you believe in God, the universe, or whatever. I just held my hands up and said, “I need help.” It was the craziest thing because I had a boohoo like we’ve all had. But at that point, when you’re at that crossroads, it’s only up to you like, yes, God is going to help you. Yes. Your friends and family are going to help you. But ultimately, it comes down to that; no one’s coming for you except for you. I just made this choice that I’m sick of being sad. I’m sick of being bummed. I am going to take back my life. And at that moment I started reading my own book because I needed to walk my walk a little bit, you know, walk my talk.
Erin: I just started with small everyday habits. Every single day, I committed to the one thing I could control, which for me was just moving my body. I started off with 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes just kept having the one thing I could count on, which was my health. Ultimately, over the next 9-10 months, I have rediscovered this level of joy, success, and big deal energy, as I discussed in my book, that I have not had in years and it was only from walking through the fire. I have doubled down on my priorities and reinvented those.
Erin: So with our time together in September, I really want to talk about how we can move from serendipitous moments to more intentionally engineered moments, juicy moments of joy, moments of excitement. My clients and I have started doing this experiment this year. Instead of creating a to-do list for this year, I created to feel lists and my to feel lists are very specific. I will tell you guys, I’m only about six weeks in. This is the first time, six weeks into a new year that I can honestly say, I don’t feel defeated from not being the perfect Saint in January. I don’t feel defeated from not accomplishing ABC because I’m focusing on the vibe I wanna attract, the habits, the mindset, and the actions I can take to cultivate and throw fire on that little spark to make it a bonfire.
Kimberly: Oh, I love that so much, and I know these women, they are drawn to me because they want to ignite the fire. We want to be able to pass the torch and they all still are working on themselves to be strong enough to do that. I know a lot of them are listening, saying I want that. As you said everyone has their story, but it’s what’s allowed me to get to where I am now so quickly and be able to have a strong mindset. A lot of the things you’re talking about is to learn from those that have gone before me. This is what’s so wonderful is y’all like you’re alone in this.
Kimberly: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking time out of your busy day, just to take a minute to pour into these women, and we are so excited to have you on that stage in September.
Erin: Vice versa, Kimberly, I cannot wait to meet every single one of you. We will all meet live in person and talk about how we can unlock more of your big deal energy.
Go out and unlock your big deal energy, Goal Diggers!
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