0:00:00 - Michelle
Welcome to the Her First podcast. I'm Michelle Pualani. Her First is a podcast to help online business owners, coaches and creators gain the confidence needed to build a successful business while creating sustainable lifestyle balance. We're here to help you prioritize yourself in your business and life. In this episode, Joanna and I are going to share with you the Her First core values, why we've chosen them and what you can expect for the future of this community. Let's get into it. So, Joanna, my fantastically fabulous co-host, Are you ready to chat about our core values today? Yes, absolutely, let's do it Lovely. So first I wanted to quickly define core values, and then Joanna will share with us why we've chosen to create core values as one of the important foundations for this podcast.
So core values are the priorities in which you use to navigate decision making within a brand, business or organization. They're simply the pillars on which you stand and how you identify in the given space that you're in. Core values are typically represented by descriptive words or short phrases that really reflect your company or personal ethics in some way. Core values are really the bedrock for how you intend to show up in your business, your brand, and truly determines the way in which others see you. They really help you clearly make aligned decisions as you navigate through the challenges of entrepreneurship, and that you know the list of core values that you have, combined with your purpose or mission, is used in order to guide you forward in business.
I also want to add a note here that it's okay for these core values to evolve over time as needed, so your one word or your main core value might shift or adjust, but the way in which you define them will also change, and that is totally welcomed. So your core values are the foundation and what you believe in that really hold up your brand, and they're used to differentiate you in a really crowded market, and the more that you can lean into them and embrace them to support you in the decision-making process that you have as a business owner, the more you're going to be able to stand out in what is a very you know again crowded market in the online space. So, Joanna, I'll pass it to you to chat a little bit more about why we actually chose to create core values just for this podcast, even though it's not a standalone business.
0:02:41 - Joanna
When Michelle and I started talking about this podcast what we wanted to be about, who we wanted it to be for we aligned on a lot of different things and it's also all things we're really passionate about. We care about all of the core values we're going to talk about today in our own lives and we want to foster a community that actually has that. So, having these core values, writing them down, they do a couple of things for us. First, they're going to be guiding principles for us on what we create, what we talk about and I do. I work on content strategies for clients all of the time and I always work on content pillars, these core values for them. So, of course, I would want to do that for myself.
When thinking about creating content, we want to make sure that we're actually putting out into the world what we discussed we wanted to put out into the world. And, coming back to those values, to make sure we're actually representing what we want it to be. And, like Michelle said, they may evolve over time. They likely will evolve over time as we grow community, you know, get more listeners, hear from you, hear your feedback, hear what you need. We'll likely evolve those over time, but it's important for us to start with something on the journey, and one of the reasons why it's so important we wanted to share them with all of you is because we want to invite you into this community and be part of what we're doing. This isn't just. You know, we haven't figured all of this out. We haven't figured out everything about putting ourselves first. We want to invite you into this community if you want to be part of these core values. So, Michelle, why don't you start with our first core value and then we'll talk?
0:04:31 - Michelle
about it. Thanks, Joanna. Yes, and we do really value this as an inclusive community in which it's a conversation that Joanna and I are having together, but also with you, and we're really excited to be able to share these with you and hope that you embrace them, and we hope that you can also share your core values with us along the journey of building your business and brand as well. So our first core value of her first is thought provoking. Thought provoking in the way that we define it is really essentially a goal that we have to make you question the norm. We want you to think a little bit more critically and open up the conversation rather than just talking at you. So, instead of simply educating or sharing stories for consumption, our podcast is a polylogue where we encourage you to reflect on your conditioned perception of yourself in the world in order to push the envelope on your personal and professional growth.
0:05:36 - Joanna
This core value is definitely super important to me. When I think about the way that I thought, even two years ago, what my mindset was, what I thought was possible, how I worked, how I did things, I'm not the same person, honestly. Sometimes I look back at old pictures of myself and think, like who is that person? I think the only way we grow and change is to listen to other people's perspective and actually think about it. Think about if something about my needs to change, if I need to practice something differently and really be open to the possibilities of other perspectives.
0:06:17 - Michelle
Yeah, and for me the philosophical depth of thinking is a really important through line in my entire life, and I think that the more self-reflective and self-aware we can be, the more that we can shift, change, adjust, not just about ourselves but about our circumstances and about our environment. And so within the personal development space, it's really, really critical to have a certain sense of thought challenging. You just don't want to assume or accept everything that you've been handed. You want to be given things and then you want to critically analyze and decide for yourself whether you're going to absorb, put into practice or not, and that's a good thing. You should challenge, you shouldn't just take things at face value, and you should always be kind of questioning what it is that someone shares with you, whether it's meant for you or not, and then using that to be a catalyst for your own, again, personal and professional growth, especially within the business space, because the more personal development you do, the more success you will have. That's great.
0:07:33 - Joanna
Our second core value is unconventional. This, to us, means that sometimes you have to break convention to get your idea life. We don't think there is a prescription for success, balance and happiness. No one size fits all approach. So we don't intend to give you a prescription, a prescriptive traditional. It has to be done this way in order to get what you want.
0:07:59 - Michelle
Yes, and this kind of really dovetails nicely off of the thought provoking is that we are not here to copy and paste some traditional, long held advice of what things are meant to be and how they're meant to be.
What we're always going to encourage you to do is choose something that works for you, choose something that is unique to you, to question the way that things are and do things differently. So we take this unconventional approach by challenging the norm kind of similar to what we talked about, but just really believing that there isn't a one size fits all, there isn't a right way to do anything, especially in the online space. I know that there is a lot of rhetoric around. Yeah, just do it this way, just follow this funnel, just write copy in this manner, just set up these things, just create your content in this way. And yes, there are formulas that are going to be more successful than others. Absolutely, we're not discounting that, but ultimately it's still. You can take the exact same cookie cutter approach and say I did everything that that person did, but you're still not going to see the same results because you are a different person.
0:09:21 - Joanna
And we're really celebrating that unconventionality and I think it's also important to note that we want you to live a life that's right for you and to not worry about what has done in the past. I've chosen to live a very unconventional life. My husband is a stay at home dad and I'm like the sole income earner of our family. He does most of the childcare and housework and I do not, and that gives me a very different perspective on life than a lot of women and a lot of business owners, Because to some people my life is like super weird. I get comments, I people have strange reactions when they learn about what my life is like, but for us and for my family and for me, this was the right choice to have us all in our household live our ideal life as a family, and I think sometimes you just have to break from those norms to really get what you want in life and make make your life work the way you want it to.
0:10:29 - Michelle
That's a really beautiful way to put it and it actually makes me reflect on. I've lived a super unconventional path myself, you know, starting in high school. I didn't finish high school the normal way, I didn't do college the traditional normal way, I didn't get a corporate nine to five, and so I have always kind of lived this unconventional path and sometimes I've questioned that and thought like well, am I missing out on the normal or the traditional? But really I think that we can embrace it more than anything and embody it. So this brings us to our third core value, which is freedom. So we foster radical responsibility or independence in ways you may not have considered, so that you experience a sense of freedom in your ability to choose.
0:11:16 - Joanna
That's really powerful Freedom isn't freedom like all of us all of us want. Actually, it makes me think of a previous episode. We put up about self care, right, and we talk about balance and this like chaos life brings, and what's the opposite of that Like freedom freedom to choose, freedom to make your own life, freedom to not be worried about what people think about comparing yourself, and just really freedom to live the life that you want, do what you want and the way you want to, and that's a really powerful way to live.
0:11:55 - Michelle
Yes, it is, and I really love this one as a part and a pillar of our community, because I truly believe that we each have the opportunity for freedom in how we're living, the way in which we're living now and I know it doesn't always feel that way and I know sometimes we have these things that we feel responsible to.
But if we choose that radical responsibility, if we choose like true autonomy and independence in who we are and how we show up in the world, that is choosing freedom. And we don't have to wait for some financial goal, we don't have to wait for some success goal, we don't have to wait for a certain thing to happen. If we can find that internal sense of freedom for ourselves, and then we can make choices from that place. Because when you make choices from that empowered place, all of the other things start to fit into place. That thing, the things that we're working towards, the goals that we have, what we're trying to accomplish it all comes from that place of choice and how we choose in each moment, how we act and how we show up, which I think is really powerful. It's really important for our community to feel like they have that choice. And if you don't yet, that's okay. Hopefully these podcast episodes and what we're working towards will help you embody that sense of freedom in your business and in your life. For our fourth, core value.
0:13:34 - Joanna
We chose the value inclusive. While we are primarily for female identifying online business owners, we welcome anyone into our community, independent of how you identify in gender, religious affiliation, race, ethnicity, business ownership, employee hood or otherwise.
0:13:54 - Michelle
Yes. So we obviously have a focus and, as any successful business, especially when you're getting started, you have a niche, you have a market and we do have a market and a focus and a niche. We encourage you to reflect on what that is for you. However, both Joanna and I on a personal level and as this bleeds into a professional level really believe in inclusivity and welcoming and being supportive and being here for each other and cheering each other on and not letting different identifying factors, like everything that Joanna listed, get in the way of that, and so we are here to cheer you on, however you're showing up today and wherever you are in your business.
You know, I think that we have these notions and we have these assumptions that, oh, that seven figure multi-million dollar business owner doesn't want to talk to me, I'm not good enough to be able to connect with them because of where I am on my journey, or there's a different identifying factor and we feel like we don't relate to others based on how we show up in the world. And so this isn't a political platform, it's not a religious platform. We're not here to talk about those things, necessarily, but we want you to know that this community is welcoming, of wherever you're coming from, whatever walk of life you take and your path in it, so absolutely inclusive.
0:15:25 - Joanna
That's such a great point and I think it's important to note that we're here for you in your journey, wherever you want to go, whatever your goals are Kind of some of the things we talked about. We're not going to offer a prescription for what success looks like, because it matters what it looks like to you and the way you identify what your personal values are. I'll play a role in that. As you know, I have a stay at home dad at home helping me. I don't there's anything wrong with someone being a stay at home mom. Right, I'm not going to ever come in and say you need to have the lifestyle that I have.
0:16:03 - Michelle
I want you to have the lifestyle that is right for you Having that permission to know that our circumstances are different and each one is valid and each one is not. Neither is better than the other. It just is what it is and we're each making those choices. So our last and fifth core value is empowering. So we want to empower you to pursue the life you want, no matter what that looks like, free from judgment and comparison.
0:16:34 - Joanna
When I first read this, one thing I thought about is that there was definitely a time in my life when I would see other people posting about their businesses and what they did on social media and like roll my eyes a little bit and think like, oh, they're not really that successful or why are they shoving that in our face. And sometimes I think about now like I am that person. And I think I actually asked my husband the other day like do you think anybody looks at what I do online and like rose their eyes and thinks, oh, that's Joanna again. And he's like, yep, I'm sure they do.
And when I think about empowering, it's because I want anyone listening to feel empowered. Go live the life that they want, do it publicly or not publicly, and have it and then also not have judgment or comparison to other people. Right, so, to do it for themselves, but then not also look at that. And I know for me, once I felt empowered to live the life that I wanted, I stopped judging others. It fully stopped for me as soon as I was living the life. I was at least moving towards living the life that I wanted to live. The hater in me like died because I was just happy being myself, and I think I want all of our listeners to feel empowered to do the same.
0:17:59 - Michelle
That's a great lesson that you wrapped up with, of when you released the need, like the need for yourself to feel fulfilled in your life. Because you were now fulfilled, you were now satisfied with what was happening, or whatever the case was. That comparison, that judgment, that hater was diminished, which I think is really powerful, because oftentimes we project, like when we have that comparison, when we have that judgment, we have that envy. There's a certain level of projection that we are doing there and it's usually something that we don't have or that it's a piece of us that's insecure or that possesses doubt. And we want you to know that in this community that you are empowered to pursue the life that you want and that could look like living again, a four hour work week, jet setting, luxurious facials, massages, buying everything that you could possibly buy.
I'm not a big buyer, but I know that like, okay, get the purse and the shoes and the dress and the life and do the things. Like, make that your thing, love it. Also, if you wanna like, move on to a farm and just live from the earth and run maybe a successful content creation business or a little digital product business on the side, or you love working in a corporate environment and you wanna show up to work every day and have a side hustle, like that's your thing, that's your thing, and we talk about that chaotic, like imbalanced lifestyle. But if you wanna work 14 hour days, and that's where you feel the best and you're still getting the sleep and the hydration and the food and everything else is a part of that and you feel fulfilled, live it, love it and feel empowered in that. Know that we will not judge you, we will not compare you to anyone else because, again, with everything that we've talked about today, with our core values, it's not the prescription, it's not this is the way to do it. It's not you have to live the life.
The way that I want to because I can tell you I see a lot of people reflect on this is I was working with the manifestation, I was working to get to this certain point and now I'm here and I'm actually realizing that I'm not as fulfilled as I thought I was going to be. And so finding that fulfillment and empowerment now, independent of whatever you're working towards, I think is a really, really powerful part of what this podcast conversation is going to look like, what our narratives are going to be and how we're going to speak to these different things, because we can feel anything that we want to feel in this moment as much as possible let's just put the mental health aside for a second, because I don't wanna be tone deaf to that but ultimately we have the opportunity to really make that choice. So okay, so I'm going to recap our five core values really quickly and then we'll go ahead and wrap this up. So thought-provoking, unconventional freedom, inclusive, empowering.
0:21:16 - Joanna
And that's it, and that's it. Those are all of our founding core values of the Her First podcast, and my biggest takeaway from this discussion is that I'm really excited to share all of these values with all of our listeners throughout this journey, and I also want to make sure that I personally live out these values outside of the time I spend working on this content, creating this content, that I always also take these into my own life.
0:21:49 - Michelle
Yes, and absolutely so. How they show up in our personal lives is a really important part of this, because your core values are going to be a reflection of who you are personally Again, kind of what we talked about at the beginning, where they come from and why they're even going to stick in your business. You know, if you have core values that aren't aligned with you personally, especially as a solopreneur, content creator or online business owner, who's typically a reflection of their brand then they're not going to have any weight in your business. So we tried to choose those core values that we personally believe in, that we feel like we can respect and honor, in the podcast and within the community of Her.
First, and I think my takeaway after listening to and chatting with you, Joanna, about these things is that we each have an opportunity every single day in how we show up, and core values are such a guiding light and really good principles, but we always have to come back to them right Like are we in alignment? Are we attuned to ourselves? Are we attuned to what we want? Are we attuned to our business goals? Are we attuned to the things that we're working towards? And having that consistent reflection and not just putting our heads down and trying to move forward without direction, without being able to actually steer the ship and look ahead and look forward. So I definitely want to keep that in mind as we continue to record for this podcast because ultimately, we've even found it's a lot of work right. It's a lot of time, it's a lot of energy. We're putting time into prepping, we have the interview, we've got the time in which we've got to block out and we both have things that we're managing and balancing in our own lives, and so I don't want to lose the trajectory of why we started the podcast and what it means for each of us and what it means for the community.
So I'm excited to have had the chance to reflect on these today with you and I hope that our community and you, as a listener, walk away feeling grounded and empowered in the core values and, hopefully, how again you can reflect on your own core values.
0:24:04 - Joanna
So thank you for tuning in. We're grateful to have you alongside this journey with us and encourage you to reevaluate your core values, personally or professionally. Hit subscribe to follow along. Please leave us a review if you've enjoyed today's episode and share it with a business friend. What is one thing you can do today to prioritize you first in business and life?
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