23: Michelle Rohr: 6 Figures with Printables and Personal Growth

Today I am talking to Michelle Rohr, who is such an inspiration for me. I love how she thinks and how insightful she is. Michelle started her business by accident, with the launch of her blog The Secret O.W.L  Society in 2011. Organically and intuitively, she’s built it up to a six-figure business. Her zone of genius and joy is focusing on taking 100% responsibility for her life and helping other women do the same.

Michelle grew her business from a place of intuition and organic growth. A lot of people start a business in order to make money and fix their lives, but Michelle started a personal growth journey to fix her life and the business grew out of that personal growth.

She started with just looking at how she can break out of the rut she was in for two years. She was doing the same thing on repeat, working in a family cafe and things were not aligned at all. One of her self-sabotaging patterns, or better yet her self-protection patterns, was putting herself last and that landed her in this position where she was. She was really just acting as a band-aid for her family, trying to keep everything together.

She started listening to audiobooks on personal development each morning during her 30-minute commute, listening about giving value to your audience and building a tribe, things she never heard of before. And every Saturday she would sit down at a cafe and she would just look at her schedule, at her goals, at her dreams. She would just have that moment of “stop and think”, which we rarely do. So every week, she would look at how she is going to get out of her comfort zone this week?  What are the things that she avoids doing? And she started doing things not because that’s what she needed to do to build a business, she was literally doing things just because she was afraid to do them.

And what happened was she grew, she expanded from the inside out. And a business needs that, you cannot start a business and be the small-minded itty-bitty person who doesn’t face their fears. You have to be growing on the inside. And the business organically grew from her own growing.

 “For me, I didn’t start a business to fix my life. I started a personal growth journey to fix my life, and the business grew out of the personal growth. “

– Michelle Rohr

She started her blog, just writing about what she was doing to be personal-development oriented and people started to follow and comment. Along with that, she created a planner, just to keep herself on track, she called it personal development 2.0. And she was just sharing pictures of her planner and people wanted  to buy it. In real life, she started to invite other girls to come on the Saturday night think tanks with her and helped them make life-binders. And that life binder became her first product that she put up for sale on Etsy store and it was the thing that became the cornerstone of her whole six-figure business.

Her blog was literally something she put together just because there was a girl who wanted to come to her Saturday night, but was never able to do so. So, Michelle would just put up the stuff on the blog for her. She literally started the blog for one person, a girl that she never met.  So, Michelle’s advice is to focus on one person and create content for them. We don’t actually have to make up people, you are already attracting people to you and they are already asking you questions. 

The other thing she noticed was how easy it is for us to discount the things that we’re good at and the things that are changing our lives. She was using her life binder for years, but she didn’t think about making it a product, because she was discounting it to-anyone can do it. But that is exactly what’s going to make you a millionaire. The thing that you think is so easy that anyone can do it. It’s easy for you because you’re the genius at it and not everyone can do it. We are all geniuses, we all have something we’re so good at. But, you have to go on this personal development journey and build your self-image and how you value yourself and what you are good at in order to turn it into a business and have people pay you for it.

You need to focus on you. You need to focus on what’s going on inside of you and grow from that place and your business will automatically grow. But, if you don’t have that approach, your business is just a distraction. 

We need to crank up the personal growth and mindset work more than ever. It’s not even an option anymore, it’s a responsibility. We never really let go of our patterns, we never really abolish it. But we can acknowledge that it’s there and know that it’s the thing that we’re doing to ourselves, but use it to our advantage instead of letting it use us.

What is your form of self-protection? If you need help with that, get Mastin Kipp’s book “Claim your power”. He goes through a list of self-protection patterns that you’re going to find yourself in. Figure out what it is, so that when you move forward you can look at your business through the lens of-how am I self-protecting right now, and you can start to act in opposition to that pattern to give your nervous system new data.

Also, you will go on this journey of realizing where it came from and understanding yourself more and realizing that it’s not because this is the way the world works or this is just how you are, it is something you learn, in response to maybe a traumatic experience you went through. And wouldn’t you love to let go of that? Wouldn’t you love to release that from your body and from your mind?

Love + Magic

Maggie