Lori has spent years teaching business owners how to market, and the reel she thought was pretty darn good got 14 views. She hasn’t had this much fun in years.
In this episode, Lori shares what happened when she started a brand new Instagram account from absolutely zero: no audience, no content library, no plan for where it’s supposed to lead. What started as a way to tackle an overwhelming garden turned into something she didn’t expect, the freedom of being a beginner again.
This isn’t a social media strategy episode. It’s about what we lose when we only do the things we’re already good at, why not every interest needs an offer, and the question every business owner chasing freedom should be asking: what do you actually want that time for?
3 Main Takeaways:
- Staying in your zone of genius is good business advice and lousy life advice. If you only ever do what you’re already good at, you never discover anything new. Being a beginner again comes with a kind of freedom expertise doesn’t.
- Give yourself an out-of-state license plate. Mistakes made while learning cost almost nothing. A small audience is a gift, because it lets you experiment, bomb, and fix things in a relatively empty room. Not every interest needs an offer, and not every hobby needs a revenue stream.
- Being a beginner makes you better at what you already do. Learning something outside her expertise reminded Lori what it feels like to be one of her clients, and how easy it is to skip the steps that have become second nature.
This Week’s Action:
Think of one thing you’ve been curious about but haven’t tried, and take one small step toward it in the next seven days. Don’t research it for weeks or sign up for an expensive program. Just do one thing. The rule: you’re not allowed to turn it into a business project, at least not this week. Afterward, ask yourself one question: did I enjoy it enough to want to do it again?
Resources Mentioned:
- Follow Lori’s new lifestyle account on Instagram: Living with Lori [insert handle/link]
- Related episodes: 348 (redefining success) and the What Do You Really Want mini-series, 353 to 355
- Book a call: talkwithlori.com
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Resources:
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0:00 Introduction
Being a Beginner Again
How My Garden Became an Instagram Account
The Freedom of Not Knowing What You’re Doing
Zone of Genius: Good Business Advice, Lousy Life Advice
The Out-of-State License Plate
Why a Small Audience Is a Gift
Not Everything Needs a Business Plan
When Did Fun Need to Be Justified?
What Being a Beginner Teaches Me About My Clients
What Do You Want the Freedom For?
This Week’s Action: Try One Thing
2. Cleaned Transcript
Introduction
I’ve spent years teaching business owners how to market, and the reel I thought was pretty darn good got 14 views. And I haven’t had this much fun in years.
I’m Lori Lyons and welcome to the Midlife Business Academy. If you’ve ever felt like your business is running your life instead of supporting it, you’re in the right place. Around here, I believe a dream business isn’t measured by its size. It’s measured by the freedom and life it makes possible.
Being a Beginner Again
I’ve just been having way too much fun lately. I started an Instagram account recently from absolutely zero. No audience waiting for me, no library of content, no B-roll ready, and certainly no carefully mapped out plan where this is supposed to lead. And remember, I’m a marketing strategist and a business coach. I teach marketing. I coach business owners on marketing. And I’ve spent years working with people to figure out what to say, where to say it, and how to get their message in front of the right people.
And suddenly, I’m sitting here on my phone trying to figure out how to edit a reel. How long should the clip be? Where should the words go? Why did Instagram cut that off? And how to talk to people on camera without looking like I’m being held hostage. I’m learning all this from scratch. And the funny thing is, I love it.
Which got me to thinking, when was the last time you let yourself be a beginner at something? Not because you need to learn it for business or because somebody told you it would make you more money, but simply because you were curious. I think we sometimes forget how much fun there can be in learning something completely new, especially after we’ve spent years being good at what we do.
How My Garden Became an Instagram Account
So here’s the backstory on how I turned my garden into an Instagram account. The account is called Living with Lori, and eventually I want it to include not only my garden, but my home, tablescaping (I’m a china addict), everyday life, and how I’m using AI for projects and ideas. There will probably be a few cats wandering through the videos too, because they seem to think they’re film stars. But so far it’s just been all about my garden.
I’ve spent more time playing in the dirt this year than I probably have in the last 20 years combined. I decided that if I was talking about how to build your life or run your business, I’d better start doing it. And gardening is where I started.
Our landscape had become completely overwhelming. Life got busy. I was busy helping take care of my mom. Business got busy. And you know what? Our yard and our house actually just got neglected. I’d walk outside and I’d see about 47 projects that needed work. And all of a sudden nothing was getting accomplished because I was really overwhelmed.
So I started using ChatGPT to think through my landscape, more as a project manager and a landscape designer, sort of. I uploaded pictures, I talked through what I wanted, and one of the best things we did was divide the yard into rooms. ChatGPT said instead of looking at it as one whole big overwhelming project, let’s make it into smaller projects. And that was an enormous help and it worked. Instead of trying to tackle my whole yard, I could focus on one area at a time, make some decisions, and actually see progress, or as much as you can when you’re a gardener.
But what surprised me was how much I enjoyed the process of gardening, not just having a prettier garden, but getting dirty, getting dirt under my fingernails, learning about plants, experimenting with different things, and figuring it out as I went. And that’s what I’ve been sharing on Instagram, including how I’ve used AI to tackle a project that once felt completely overwhelming.
And as the seasons change, I’ll be moving indoors because I love decorating, I love entertaining, I love setting a pretty table, and I’ve got a lot of home projects to tackle. But I also wanted to share some of the stories behind the things I love, including pieces that have been in my family for generations.
The Freedom of Not Knowing What You’re Doing
So I have ideas where this account might go, but I’m not in a hurry to figure out what it’s going to do, and that’s unusual for me, especially because I’ve spent my entire professional life talking about marketing strategy. So there’s a certain freedom in not knowing what you’re doing.
And one of the things that I’m enjoying most is creating the content myself. I’m learning how to shoot B-roll. I’ve kind of done it before, but not in a specific way, deciding what I want for B-roll and going out and shooting it. It just kind of happened. I’m learning how to edit clips together, find music, create carousels, and design reel covers.
I’ve been doing my podcast on video now for about a year, but sitting in front of my laptop with my camera is very different than being out in the wild with my phone talking to it. I’ve never been really great at that. So I’m learning some of the tips and secrets on how to do that better. And anybody who knows me knows I typically don’t have a problem talking. But you put the camera in front of me and tell me to act natural, and suddenly I have to think about what to do with my hands, all this stuff.
And yeah, I could outsource most of this. My amazing Vanessa is dying to take this over. It would save me time, but I don’t want to, at least not right now. I might at some point, but right now I want to learn how to do it myself.
One of my social media idols is Molly Mahoney, a dear friend, and she will take a video of something, edit it right there on the fly, and pop it up to Instagram and social media. That’s what I want to be able to do, to be able to just do reels on the fly as they come up.
Zone of Genius: Good Business Advice, Lousy Life Advice
And it also gives me something else to think about, which is something we hear all the time. Stay in your zone of genius. My zone of genius is certainly not editing reels for social media, and I believe in that advice when it comes to running a profitable business. But I’m starting to think that staying in your zone of genius might be good business advice and lousy life advice. Because if we only do the things we’re already good at, how are we ever going to discover something new?
The Out-of-State License Plate
And the best part of learning something new is that I don’t have to be very good at it. You know when you’re driving somewhere you’ve never been before, and you’ve got an out-of-state license plate, and you’re in the wrong lane, you miss your turn, your GPS tells you to turn left when you’re in the far right lane, and everybody’s honking at you and you’re like, hey, look at my license tag. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going. Give me a break here.
That’s how I feel about Instagram right now. I’m not far from missing the turn and showing my license tag, but that’s okay. I’ve made carousels and realized after posting them that I cut words off of the graphics. I’ve looked at finished videos and said, oh, this is just bad. And I’ve taken things down and totally redone them because they were really bad.
And you know what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Instagram police didn’t show up at my house. My marketing business did not implode. My coaching clients didn’t leave me. And nobody revoked my marketing credentials. I fixed it. I learned something. And I moved on.
Why a Small Audience Is a Gift
And here’s another thing that’s working in my favor. My audience is small, very small, embarrassingly small, to the point that when I get a new follower, I’m like, woohoo.
Now as marketers, we’re trained to think that’s a problem. We want more followers, more views, and more reach. And yeah, I want the account to grow. But having a small audience while I’m learning is actually a gift. I get to make mistakes in a relatively empty room. I can experiment, change my mind, and figure out what I enjoy creating without feeling like thousands of people are watching. I can bomb in front of a few people. The stakes are pretty low.
And you know what? That’s kind of refreshing for a change, because I think one of the challenges of becoming experienced and successful is that we start feeling like we’re supposed to have all the answers. We have reputations to protect, and somehow that makes us hesitant to try something where we might not be very good at it.
So let me ask you something. Is there anything you’ve wanted to try, but you haven’t because you’re afraid you won’t be good at it? Maybe you need to give yourself an imaginary out-of-state license plate.
Not Everything Needs a Business Plan
And here’s the other thing that I have found interesting. Not everything needs a business plan. I have no idea how I’m going to monetize this Instagram account or even if I’m going to. And right now, I don’t particularly care. And that’s a strange sentence for me to say.
Of course, my marketing brain occasionally wanders in here and starts saying, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to do it? Who’s the audience? What’s the strategy? Where is this going? And I can’t help it. And my answer is, go away. I’m having fun right now.
But while I’m not trying to build a business around the account, I am being intentional about it. I’ve been very careful about training my Instagram algorithm. I want to see the things that I’m interested in, and I want to attract people who share those interests. So when I’m on Living with Lori, I’m looking at gardening accounts, home decorating, tablescapes, landscape content, and people sharing things that I enjoy. I’m not spending my time looking at tutorials about making reels or accounts teaching Instagram marketing. I go to my business account for that.
And sometimes it’s really hard, because I have to pay real close attention to what account I’m on. It’s easy to forget, and sometimes I realize I’m looking at something on the wrong account. But I really want to train that algorithm. I’m enjoying discovering a completely different community of people, and I want to keep that experience and that community separate from my business world.
So if you’re interested in gardening, home projects, tablescaping, AI in everyday life, or just seeing what I’m getting into next, you’re welcome to follow me at Living with Lori. And if I don’t follow you back, please don’t be offended. I’m trying to keep the algorithm trained, and I’ve worked too hard on it to confuse it now.
When Did Fun Need to Be Justified?
But there’s a bigger point here. As entrepreneurs, we can get in the habit of looking at everything through a business lens. We can discover something we enjoy and immediately start wondering whether we can monetize it, create an offer, or build a business around it. As I said earlier, before we know it, something that starts out as fun all of a sudden becomes another item on our to-do list.
And I’m giving you permission. There’s nothing wrong with creating a business around something you love. But not every interest needs an offer, and not every hobby needs a revenue stream. Sometimes the answer to “what’s the point?” can simply be “because I enjoy it.”
We spent decades building careers and businesses, raising families, paying mortgages, and taking care of all the stuff that needs to be taken care of, taking care of everybody and everything. And those responsibilities don’t necessarily disappear when we hit midlife. Sometimes they just change. But I wonder when we started feeling like fun needed to be justified.
I don’t have to become a master gardener to enjoy my garden. I don’t have to become an influencer to enjoy making videos. And I don’t have to start selling tablescapes just because I love setting a pretty table. I can do something because I love it, and that’s enough.
What Being a Beginner Teaches Me About My Clients
So what is this teaching me about business? There’s one business lesson I wasn’t expecting from all of this, and I think it’s particularly important for those of us in the service industry: coaches, speakers, anybody who shares their expertise for a living. Being a beginner again is reminding me what it feels like to be one of my clients.
When you’ve been doing something for years, you forget how much you know. Things that seem perfectly obvious to you aren’t necessarily obvious to somebody who’s never done them before. I’ll be watching a video editing tutorial, and the person demonstrates something and says, now you just do this. And I’m sitting there thinking, wait a minute, back up. How did you get there? What did I miss? And I have to restart it, go back, and look at it again.
And then I think how many times I’ve done exactly the same thing when explaining marketing or websites to a client. It’s not intentional. It’s just that when something becomes second nature, you forget all the little steps it takes to get there.
So learning something outside of my expertise has given me a real fresh appreciation for what my clients experience. It’s reminding me to slow down, explain things clearly, and remember that what’s simple to me may be completely new to somebody else. I started this account to share things that I’m enjoying in my personal life, and it’s turning out to be a pretty good professional development experience too. It’s just not the one I planned.
What Do You Want the Freedom For?
So where is Living with Lori going? I really don’t know. Maybe it grows into something bigger, maybe it becomes a business of its own, or maybe it stays exactly what it is. Right now, I’m enjoying creating things, learning new skills, and seeing what happens.
And it brings me back to something we’ve been talking about on the podcast lately. We talked about building businesses that fit our lives instead of lives that fit our business. We talked about redefining success and recognizing that what we wanted from our business 10 or 15 years ago may not be what we want today. We talk about wanting more freedom, more flexibility, and more time to do the things that we enjoy.
But here’s the question I think we need to ask ourselves. What do we want that time for? If we’re working this hard to create a business that gives us more freedom, shouldn’t we also be thinking about what we want to do with that freedom? What are we curious about? What have we always wanted to learn? What sounds like fun? And maybe the biggest question of all is, what would you do if you knew you never had to make a dime from it?
Maybe some of the space we’re working so hard to create in our lives is supposed to be for discovering things we didn’t even know we loved.
This Week’s Action: Try One Thing
So I’m going to give you your action step for this week, and it’s a very simple one. Think of one thing you’ve been curious about but haven’t tried. Maybe it’s something creative, something you’ve always wanted to learn, or something that just sounds like fun. And take one small step toward doing it in the next seven days.
Not research it for the next couple of weeks. Not sign up for an expensive program and develop a detailed plan. Just do one thing. If you wanted to paint, go purchase some paints and put something on paper, even if you’re drawing straight lines. If you wanted to learn photography, go take some pictures with your phone or get out your old camera. If you wanted to make videos, pick up your phone and record something. You don’t even have to post it.
And here’s the rule. You’re not allowed to turn it into a business project, at least not this week. So don’t worry about whether you’re good at it, whether anybody else will like it, or whether there’s a way to make money from it. Just give yourself permission to try something because it interests you.
And afterwards, ask yourself one question. Did I enjoy it enough to want to do it again? That’s it. That’s your entire assignment.
I’m still working on keeping my marketing brain out of the room. It keeps wandering back in with questions about strategy, and sometimes I let it win. But here’s what I know for certain. Building the business of your dreams isn’t just about the business. It’s about creating enough room in your life to discover what else you love.
And if you’re looking at your business and wondering whether it’s giving you that kind of room, let’s talk. Head to talkwithlori.com and schedule a call. We’ll look at what you’ve built and whether it’s supporting the life you actually want.
I’m Lori Lyons, and remember, it’s never too late to build the business of your dreams. We’ll see you next week.