Beyond Business Podcast Ep 20

Written By Debbie Lee

Episode 20

Business for Busy Minds with Stephanie Wasylyk

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EPISODE SUMMARY

Join me for this conversation with Stephanie Wasylyk, a business coach and founder of the Happy Squirrel Collective - a unique ADHD-friendly community for business owners.

Stephanie shares her 12-year journey in coaching, including how her niche in supporting ADHD entrepreneurs has unfolded naturally.

We explore her innate talent for creating supportive structure amidst chaos and how this can be a complimentary pairing for those of us with busy brains and creative minds.

Our conversation also touches on the need for intentional and inclusive business practices to ensure that spaces are welcoming for everyone, especially those with ADHD. And how those spaces can allow each of us to develop an approach to business that is unique to us.

CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE

If you enjoy this episode and would like to find out more about Stephanie and The Happy Squirrel Collective, you can find out more in the following places:

MORE WAYS TO GO BEYOND BUSINESS

Got a topic you’d like to request or a guest to recommend? Drop me an email

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:02 - Debbie (Host)

Welcome to Beyond Business the podcast, the show for purpose-driven founders who want to be part of a bigger change and make a difference that reaches beyond your business alone. I'm your host, Debbie, and you're so welcome here. This week on the podcast, I'm speaking with Stephanie Wasilek. Stephanie is a fellow business coach and founder of the Happy Squirrel Collective, an ADHD friendly community for business owners who want to get stuff done. During our conversation, we're talking about some of the common challenges we face as business owners with busy brains and creative flair, and how Stephanie's natural ability to find structure out of chaos can be supportive in doing this in a way that is both effective and enjoyable. I hope you enjoy. Let's dive in. A very warm welcome to the podcast, Stephanie. It is an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for agreeing to coming along and being our guest today. It's just wonderful to host you my pleasure.

01:14 - Stephanie (Guest)

This is going to be fun.

01:15 - Debbie (Host)

I'm looking forward to it yeah, yeah, this is like I think it's worth starting off by saying that this is um only our second ever conversation, and the first one it was just this like instant hit, where I really like I walked away from that time with so much curiosity and this real desire to learn more about you and your work. So, yeah, I feel like this episode is as much for my own personal curiosity and benefit as it is for the listeners. Yeah, likewise. So I wonder, yeah, I wonder how you're arriving, because it's morning, morning time with you right?

01:57 - Stephanie (Guest)

nope, it's after school time, kids being picked up right now. I, yeah, I'm just so excited to have this conversation with you. I've been looking forward to it all day. I'm energized, also recovering from a cold, so forgive my raspy voice no, we were just.

02:15 - Debbie (Host)

It's that time of year, I know, it's just these constant, I think the transitional seasons and um, along with back to school, is always an interesting mix, exactly I think, yeah, awesome. So I'm gonna dive right in by um, touching on the fact that you describe yourself as, uh, an ADHD friendly business coach, and um, yeah, when I so, when I first came across your work, I thought, wow, this is really cool. I've not, like I've not, come across anyone else with that particular niche and I am, yeah, I'm super curious, just to start off with, if you could give us a little bit of a background as to how you came across this niche.

03:06 - Stephanie (Guest)

Yeah, absolutely so. I've been coaching for 12 years and I have been the quintessential coach who could never find a niche.

03:16

I was like I know and I would teach it. I know niching is great, but to me niching is kind of like an experiment you try it on, you write all the copy, you put in all the work, you start talking about it, but really it just kind of depends on what your clients present with. And so my very first foray into niching, I was a health coach and I found that, like, seriously, all of my clients wanted to know how to become a health coach and so I was business coaching my clients as a health coach and so it took a you know a year or two into that and I was like, well, this is silly, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna stop writing recipes and all of this and let's just dive right into business. And so, and it was the right fit for me, this is definitely the right path. And you know I've had lots of iterations of business coaching along the way.

04:10

I've worked with, you know, holistic health practitioners. I've worked with different types of businesses and only more recently have I kind of declared the ADHD friendly aspect, Because again, I'm just finding almost all of my clients are diagnosed or undiagnosed but they're telling me like, oh yeah, it's my ADHD here. Oh yeah, I'm having trouble with this because of you know ADHD or I think I have ADHD, and so it felt like such a disservice to them to remain ignorant about it. Right To just know what I knew based on word of mouth and seeing Instagram posts. So I spent the last few years really just doing my own research and being intentional about how I can suit my practice to more needs. I can suit my practice to more needs and then eventually kind of declaring that to make sure that people know it's a safe space or a friendly space if you have ADHD.

05:16 - Debbie (Host)

Oh, I love it. It sounds like it's so interesting to hear you describe it that way where it sounds like well, certainly as an, an onlooker, it sounds like the niche almost find you in a way, when you just said it, that like it was almost a natural response to the people you were working with anyway, well, exactly because I'm actually not sure if it's just because X percentage of business owners have ADHD, that could very well be why many of my clients say that.

05:51 - Stephanie (Guest)

But I also know that my style tends to be very systematic, process-oriented, accepting anti-shame. There's a lot of parts of the way that I work that make it innately very ADHD friendly, and so I'm not actually sure why that niche found me, which maybe it's both.

06:16 - Debbie (Host)

That is so fascinating. I find this so interesting and it's something that I see so commonly with my own clients. I think sometimes those skills or the characteristics that come so naturally to us, they're often the ones then that we really excel at. But I think we often become so normalized to them ourselves that we don't quite realize that that is actually our superpower. So what you describe with yourself and your logical and very systematic approach I imagine that has been with you for a very long time I was just like oh, of course, oh, totally, you know totally Totally so.

07:04 - Stephanie (Guest)

If you follow Myers-Briggs at all which honestly I don't really, but I'm an INTJ which a coach said to me once that that basically means order out of chaos and it means you can see the big picture and all the little steps. And I have a like creative and logical side, both. You know both sides to me and I think those were all epiphanies to me. When she was telling me this, you know, I was like, oh, like not everyone can do that, oh, and that was I don't know five, six, seven years ago, I forget when, and I started to even just claim those parts of me right and my marketing, and start talking about a creative logic process or about order out of chaos. Uh, and so probably talking about those things do resonate with someone who who feels scattered or has a busy brain or can't seem to make order out of their business, and you know, so I it's all. It all just kind of comes together. I'm waving my hands around here because I don't know if you can see me, but that's you know.

08:10

this is why niching partly, yes, you can just decide a niche and then go for it, and partly it finds you and partly it's both and we can try all we want, but it took me 11 years. And who knows who knows if this will stick right like I think I think it will.

08:27 - Debbie (Host)

It's an evolving process yes, this, yeah, that's it, and actually what I've started to play with along these lines, um with my own clients, is like finding our niche through ourselves too. So trying to draw those characteristics of ourselves and the way we work and use that to define our niche as well, or like as one input, one piece of the puzzle, just the way that you described too.

09:02 - Stephanie (Guest)

I was going to say, too, that's okay, you know what you go. Well, I was going to say I also am experimenting really heavily right now with my style of coaching being very pure coaching. So a lot of coaches are consultants, mentors, coaches, teachers, like a lot of those things altogether right, and I am very much honing my skills as a thought partner, as a thinking partner, as a pure coach. I don't know that everyone needs to be taught to right in a lot of ways, and so this is part of I'm curious about where that will go with the types of clients that that come to me. But it feels very important to me in this, in this journey of like where coaching is going.

09:55 - Debbie (Host)

this is kind of the stake that I want to have as a thought partner yeah, I love that, and it strikes me that there's a real empowerment that comes with that for your clients. It's really like supporting their independence in some way and like supporting their own thought leadership, for want of a better word Exactly their self trust thought leadership, for, want of a better word, exactly their self-trust.

10:25

Yes, yes, amazing um, I would really love it. So I, um have trolled your website. It's awesome, um, when I looked at a lot of the um things that you like, a lot of the topics and a lot of the themes that you cover, like so many of them were really resonant to me and like my own personal experience as an entrepreneur, and I um I'm not diagnosed with ADHD and I've never sought a referral of any kind either and at the same time, I really recognize this busy brain of mine that is just constantly like maybe not constantly, but like very frequently it feels full, um, and so, yeah, I'm just like curious to hear more about that and, um, how common that is amongst entrepreneurs, who are generally like more innovative and creative and passionate about what they do, etc.

11:32 - Stephanie (Guest)

My unstudied, unreferenced number would be that a hundred percent of us feel that way. I don't know if there's a difference between men and women in that regard. I don't know if it's even fully specific to people with ADHD or not. I have plenty of clients without ADHD that still feel that way. Right, running a business is a lot. Still feel that way. Right, running a business is a lot. It's so badass that we do this and it's really freaking cool that a person can just make something out of nothing and to do that requires so many things in our brains. Even the best project management system and time management system like there's just so much to handle. And then if you add on top of that anything in your life right, that might go wrong, it's just, it adds to that. So I think I think we all just need to like give ourselves a break and be like okay, this is, this is okay.

12:40 - Debbie (Host)

Take a deep breath and then maybe try and find some ways to handle it yeah, there's something there about the like, the volume of stuff today and also the variety as well, I find, as um, an entrepreneur, you know, I guess, for if you're a solopreneur in particular, you know you are the marketing department, you are the finance team, you are like the person, like the professional actually doing the thing that you do as well, and sometimes the tasks involved in those things are actually they're quite different tasks. They're very different styles of tasks, like some are clicking buttons and, you know, fiddling with spreadsheets, and then other aspects are very relational and require a real connection and presence, and sometimes even just constantly switching between those things is can be quite draining in itself yeah, and we only have so many days in a week or hours in a day, and for some of us that's even more compressed.

13:51 - Stephanie (Guest)

And I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to work 40 hours a week. I work four days a week, not eight hour days like it's. Yeah, it's partly why we're business owners, because we want to have that control and flexibility, and so now we're trying to do what is probably five or six people's worth of jobs into one in not even a full-time capacity to hire people to do the things we're not good at, and all of that. But that's typically not the experience of a brand new business owner or even someone like me who's been doing it for 12 years. I hire people for specific things, but I don't have any team members on a regular basis. I do it all myself and, for the record, I also don't have ADHD as far as I know.

14:43 - Debbie (Host)

This is um and it's still a challenge yeah, yeah, I think so, the thing that really struck me.

14:51

So, coming into entrepreneurship from um a background of employment, I think the other thing about it that struck me is how there is there's also no confines in the same way that there is in an employed role.

15:08

So, you know, when I worked for a large part of my career, I worked in an office setting, and so there was um an explicit expectation that you were at your desk between the hours of 10am and 3pm and you could work. You know you could choose what you did around those hours, but like you had to be there for a set period of time every day, and like even that as a basic premise we don't have as entrepreneurs, like you get to make up your own rules, which is, like you know, that is the appeal in so many ways, and it requires that extra layer of decision making and discipline and, yeah, all that goes along with that. And so I'm curious, like with your work, that one of your main offerings is is through, is in community, and and like I wonder how yeah, how you got to that. Was it for this accountability or buddying, or yeah, I'm just curious to hear more.

16:20 - Stephanie (Guest)

There are so, so, so many benefits to community, both to me as a business owner and business model wise, but also to the people I work with, right. So my community is called the Happy Squirrel Collective and it's a group of business owners and it's an ADHD friendly community, and I say it's for business owners who want to get shit done their own way, and something that's really important to me I will answer your question. This is like the kind of the backstory, but something that's really important to me is that we can do things our own way and no one can really tell you the way that's going to work for you, and so a fundamental concept or premise of the community is self-discovery through understanding what works for other people, through discussion, through seeing other business owners doing things their own way, so that it's normalized and there's positive examples and role models. Who aren't these bro marketers who have 85 people on their team just telling us how they can work six hours a week and make a million dollars right? This is a group of people who are actually doing the work, who are in it and who are trying to solve these problems for themselves, are in it and who are trying to solve these problems for themselves, like how can I be the most productive?

17:46

What way works for me when I am trying to estimate time for a project, how should I do it? And I'm not going to say here are the five steps to estimate time for a project. It's about this collective knowledge of what works for this person and what works for that person and then, through seeing all of that, you can figure out what works for you. And of course, I'm facilitating that reflection right so that they're not just like left on their own devices. But I really see myself as a coach in that role, not as someone who's sharing tons of resources and here's how I did it. I don't share how I did it. Actually, that's not true. I do share how I did it, but only in combination when other people are sharing how they did it oh, my goodness, I love it.

18:32 - Debbie (Host)

I want to like double stamp, underline like what you said at the start there, because, oh, it's just, I think it's such an important message to get across because I think in so many um arenas, coaching has become synonymous with, with, like mentoring and consultancy and that like here's what to do, here's your, yeah, that three-step plan.

19:00

You know, here's your three-step plan to six figures in six weeks and like it just, I think it one it doesn't work. But also I actually think it's a really, really unhelpful message to give people, especially people early on in their business, because I know that um and I I think there's a bit like I did this early in my own coaching journey and I think there's a, to a certain extent, you sort of have to do it and get over it, but I did so much of like trying other people's things and then feeling like a failure when they didn't work exactly. So I think it's not only like not helpful. It can really eat into people's confidence and, um, yeah, their self-belief and their trust in their business, all those things that you mentioned.

19:54 - Stephanie (Guest)

Well, so here's, here's the takeaway. We're going to just go right out of the gate here. I I mean everyone hears the thing like, oh, I don't believe in failure, fail forward, all of this stuff. I just see the entire experience of a business as an experiment. Pretty much every part of it is an experiment. Not every experiment works, not every experiment does what you think it's going to do, but we do learn from every experiment. So if we take an example of what we were just talking about, right, like, as a business owner, we get to do whatever we want, whatever we want, and that's you know.

20:34

So this is a conversation we have in the community on a regular basis. It's like how do I even stick to a schedule when I'm making the schedule? And I'm already not great at sticking to schedules because of how my brain works, right and so the members bring different ideas. One person may have more of like a task menu that they choose from. We talk about you know what to do on a day when you're feeling good, or, as the group kind of declared it, a good brain day or a bad brain day, I don't know. I think you had Lauren Van Mullen, maybe on your podcast, but anyways, she coined the term good brain day and bad brain day, and so we have a little bit of a menu.

21:19

Some people find that really, really helpful. Other people find it helpful to time block and look ahead and know okay, well, first thing tomorrow morning I'm doing this. Other people find it helpful to break things down into 20 minute chunks. Other people need 90 minutes to really get focused. You know, other people need every step broken down in really small pieces. Other people can tackle a big project and feel really liberated by that. Some people need to work at their desk, other people need to work in a coffee shop, like I could go on and on and on. But this is where we have to figure out. It's our responsibility, our main responsibility as a business owner, is to figure out what works for us. It's an ongoing process. It can change with the seasons, the time of the month, the day of the week, the time of the day, and it's like an ongoing process or experiment to figure out what works for us yeah, I totally wholeheartedly.

22:14 - Debbie (Host)

I think that like to me, that is it one of the key skills of being. It's like this central skill maybe of being an entrepreneur, like being able to hold the chaos, whatever your extent of, or like hold the uncertainty and the not knowing and still be able to like get things done. I was gonna say move forward.

22:41 - Stephanie (Guest)

It doesn't always feel like nope, sometimes it's very much backwards sideways diagonal yeah, but it's something that that I mean I used to work for Blackberry. I say I used to work for Blackberry when it was cool, because it basically doesn't exist anymore but you just didn't have control over your day. You were placed wherever you needed to be, when you needed to be there, you had a list of tasks. No one cared if you were having a good day or a bad day, you just did your work. Yeah, where, when we go out on our own, it's like anything is possible yeah, absolutely, which is great, and yeah, challenges.

23:22

We said yeah well, and why do you think so many business owners are so into like personal development right like we have to be?

23:31 - Debbie (Host)

yeah, that's right. Yeah, because it is, yes, exactly. You are the culture of your, of your whole company, exactly, absolutely. Um, so I'm, yeah, I'm curious, like what, what do you find is like the most helpful thing that your, your clients or your community come away with?

23:55 - Stephanie (Guest)

Oh my gosh, that's a big question. The most helpful thing I can tell you what I hope? The most helpful things are.

24:03

My entire intention is is that self-discovery part? Right, of course, that they learn more about themselves. I definitely want people to get stuff done. That's why they're there, right? If they can consistently make progress, whatever that looks like, or even just show up to take action, sometimes on things they've been procrastinating or avoiding for weeks, months, years, that's a massive win for me, but it's like a huge, huge life-changing win for them, right. It starts to build their self-trust and confidence that they can do it in a world especially again, most of these people have ADHD, where they've been told repeatedly they're not good enough, they can't like. Why can't you be like everybody else? Why can't you just get this done? Why can't you like? They have had experienced so many instances of shame, and so it's my sincerest hope that we can start to undo some of that, even just a little bit of that, and build that confidence in their business and the, the knowing that they can do it their own way, whatever that looks like.

25:18 - Debbie (Host)

I love it, I love it, and yeah, what a powerful takeaway.

25:25 - Stephanie (Guest)

It's terrible for marketing. Nobody really wants to buy that, but it's what I'm going to keep talking about forever because it's so important, important. I could tell you like, oh, my clients make more money or they have more time or whatever. Like I don't really measure those things, I it just is a feeling for me that they are happier, more satisfied, less, um, hard on themselves. The thing I hear in almost all of our group calls when I ask at the end, like what are you taking away or what do you find valuable, they say it's just so nice to know I'm not the only one experiencing this yeah, yeah, yeah.

26:06 - Debbie (Host)

That's the power of a grip, and I think that having the like, the privilege of seeing someone else's internal world and then thinking, okay, well, if they can do it, I can do it, yeah, I love it. So if anyone listening um would like to check out the community or find out more about your work in general, I wonder where we can find you online well, my website is stephaniewaslickcom, sometimes hard to spell, but if you just Google the Happy Squirrel Collective, you'll find my community.

26:41 - Stephanie (Guest)

I'm sure you'll have links to that. I would say I put a lot of thought into my newsletter. I call them permission slips, and it's not weekly, it's whenever I get a chance on a Monday to write something, which isn't always every Monday, but that's where I share a lot of articles, again, not where I'm saying step-by-step here are the five things, but where I'm just kind of musing. Here are some options if you're trying to manage your time better, or how do you break down tasks, what you know. And I do talk a lot about coaching too, like my style and my philosophy, so that's another great place. So you have the community which you can just kind of join directly. There's always a bar at the top of that page that gives you whatever the latest discount is or promotion. I'm running will always be at the top of that page, so but you'll also always find out about that on my newsletter.

27:39 - Debbie (Host)

Fabulous, fabulous.

27:40 - Stephanie (Guest)

Yeah.

27:41 - Debbie (Host)

Thank you so much. I will add the links to each of those to the show notes If anyone would like to click through from there. Awesome.

27:50 - Stephanie (Guest)

I'm like, not some crazy famous person. I love just hearing from people too, so you can always reach out to me and say hi or see if you want to connect. I am very open to that as well awesome, awesome.

28:05 - Debbie (Host)

yeah, what a lovely invitation. Thank you, stephanie, fabulous. Well, it's been so wonderful to spend this time with you and hear about your work and just like enjoy your enthusiasm and your energy as well. It's like it's later on in the evening here and I noticed that I'm leaving this conversation really energized. Yes, my cheeks are a little bit red. I'm like yes, thank you so much.

28:32 - Stephanie (Guest)

Likewise.

28:33 - Debbie (Host)

Fabulous, all fabulous, all right. Well, bye for now. Bye, thank you so much thank you so much for listening to this episode of beyond business. If you've loved what you've heard, I would be incredibly grateful if you could rate and review the podcast so that together we can create a global ecosystem of change makers, pioneering business as a force for good. Until then, I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode.

Debbie Lee
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Beyond Business Podcast Ep 19