Creating an intentional life

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:We are so excited to share the life of and academy with you. The cart is finally open and we are actively taking registrations. It is a four week digital course that is going to help you take your life from reactive chaos to intention and to peace. I promise you, my life is living proof of this. This is like me taking my little book of hacks and tips and processes and framework works and giving them to you in as concise a clear way as I can. So I hope you will join us in the life of Ant academy so that we can help you pursue your exceptional, extraordinary, sustainable life of ant. One of my early mentors said to me is, he said, you reveal what you know by the questions you ask, not by the statements you make. And that, I think, is just really good advice.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:50]:Whenever I'm feeling uncertain, whenever I can ask questions, it shifts the focus from myself to the other person, the other situation, to curiosity, to a better understanding of the environment. And whenever I can just get the focus off myself, all that goes away. Because I'm more naturally in a helper posture and position versus like, oh my word, what are they thinking about me? Because impostor syndrome really is about you looking at yourself in the context of how you want other people to view you when you're just there to help. I'm a small town kid born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. 17 years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy and ever since, my husband, Jr. And I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:42]:Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered that I could purposely embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you, too. I'm Tiffany Souder, and this is scared confidence. I love doing conversations like the one that you're going to hear today. I had a young woman reach out to me. Her name is Grace Vandenbrink, and she has been listening to the podcast and said, hey, I am early in my career. I'm getting married.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:19]:I know I want to be a mom. Can I just ask you some questions, Tiffany? So we talked about everything from growing up on farms to how we create the sense of home for our families and about the early years of growing element three. So I know you're going to get something from this conversation. She's so gracious and vulnerable, and I think we all can learn from her. Just curiosity. And what does the next stage of life.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:02:44]:Hold.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:45]:And if you listen to this episode and think, holy crap, I've got some of my own questions, we are going to start doing a few more of these coffee over microphones. And if you're interested in jumping on the mic with me and asking questions and sharing those questions and answers with the world, there is a link in the show notes to a form where you can submit your questions, and maybe you'll be the next one to join me on the microphone. So thanks for listening in. And I know that you are out there crushing your life of and.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:03:16]:I.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:16]:Met Grace because she reached out over LinkedIn. And I'll read a little bit of your message to me. You said, I'd love to do a virtual coffee. So here we are doing our virtual coffee with no beverage in hand. And you said, it feels like I'm just at the beginning of the journey that I shared with my own entrepreneurial journey. You have an upcoming marriage, or maybe you already got married, I don't know, and have the vision and dream of having kids in the future. So you were like, hey, I see you, Tiffany, are maybe a life stage or two ahead of me. And so I'd love to learn from you.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:46]:So I said, yeah, let's do that conversation, Grace. And if you don't mind, let's record it, because I'm certain the questions that you have are the questions that other young women have, young parents trying to figure out, how do we do all this stuff? So any other context that you want to provide before I kind of hand it over to you?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:04:04]:Yeah. Well, first off, thank you so much for agreeing to it. And it being recorded is awesome, too. I see you as in the stages of life. Yeah, maybe those next. The two ahead of me. And so I always look to find people who I admire and want to model my life after. So I heard you speak first at the EOS conference, and I was like, that's where I want to be.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:04:29]:That's the life that I want to have eventually. And you shared the story that you went through, and so I thought, here's somebody sharing really authentically on stage. That's somebody that I want to learn from and where I can maybe skip through the hurdles that you went through. And I'm sure I'll still have my own struggles, but I always like to learn from people and get that opportunity. So I appreciate you being willing to do this.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:53]:Yeah, you're really smart, Grace. I feel like my own self reliance can sometimes be a curse. I think it gives me a level of, like, I don't always feel pain. I can keep going. But I think you're so wise to reach ahead and get yourself exposed to the world people are living in, the questions that they've already solved. So I think you're really bright for doing that.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:05:12]:Yeah, I try to do a balance. I like to think of asking people for their advice and taking in what they've learned throughout life and then also knowing what's true for me and what is true in my life and how they've done things maybe sparks a different idea for me in a different direction, maybe that they didn't go to. But having had that knowledge and that wisdom helps me to make a better choice for myself, for my family, eventually, someday.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:40]:So before we launch into questions, why don't you give listeners just like a two minute overview of where you're at in your life. You're a co founder in your business, kind of what that looks like and how long you've been doing that. Give them a level set of where you're at, and then we'll jump into questions.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:05:54]:Yeah. So I am the co founder and chief of staff at no Honesty. I've been with this organization for five and a half years, and we're on a mission to change the way the world communicates. And I've been really blessed in my career to work alongside my business partner and founder of no honesty, Ken Bogard. So he's been a huge part of helping me build my career. And now we're really out there working with clients, helping them create cultures of real communication. And this is a bit of a shift in career for me. Newly recent.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:06:24]:So I've been behind the scenes developing all of our content, working on a book manuscript that we're bringing to the world this year. But now I've done a shift and I'm more public facing, and I find that that comes with its own set of challenges and a whole different world. Because it's one thing to be a co founder and not need to be out there with people, but it's another thing to be a co founder and out there working with clients or working to get clients and things like that comes with its own challenges.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:52]:Excellent. And you're engaged, is that right?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:06:55]:Yes, that's part of it, too. So I'm 25, I'm engaged. We get married June eigth of this year. My fiance is an apple farmer. We met when I was bartending, actually, and he came in for the bar. I like to say that we were friends for two years. Before, he would say he was not trying to be my friend. And so we've been together for about two years now, and I'm really excited for that day.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:07:21]:But when I think about what comes past that day and when it comes to my career, I'm looking at the women, the other women in the field that I know and other women in professional landscapes. They always say that motherhood is so tough because there's the balance of being a mom and then also having these ambitions and these career things that you want to achieve and wanting to help people and having a whole bunch of different people that you're accountable to and that you want to serve really well. And I look at that challenge and I want to know, how do I do it really well for all the people in my life, whoever that might be at that point?

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:59]:One last question for you. What did your mom do when you were growing up?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:08:04]:It's interesting because she was a stay at home mom, but not, I like to say, not in the traditional sense. So I grew up on a dairy farm, and I'm the last of eight kids. And so we were very active in the farm. We cared for the animals. I did a lot of the calf raising with her, but she had a bachelor's, a double major in accounting and business administration. So she did all of the back end paperwork, taxes, those types of things. So if she wasn't outside working with the animals, with us and the kids and things like that, she was inside working on paperwork in addition to running us to all of our things with school or church on the weekends and stuff like that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:42]:Yeah. So you had a professional mom. It's just not in the sense of she went away to work. She had big responsibility in your family business, for sure. Yeah.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:08:51]:She always said that the family came first, and for her, it most definitely did. And she put a lot of value when I was growing up on stay at home moms, she says, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world was her saying. And so that was something that when I was growing up, I wrestled with, like, was I going to be a stay at home mom? Was I going to be a mom in general? And that's a question that I wrestled with coming into my professional career and for us and for our family, the decision is yes, when that day comes.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:21]:Awesome. I'm excited to get to the conversation. I think there's a lot of big questions that life has a way of sort of unfolding in due time, but I'm happy to share my experience and maybe help with some of the questions I asked my own journey. I also grew up in a very agrarian environment. So I feel like while we did not have livestock, my dad farmed until I was in third grade. My uncles farmed, my grandpas were farmers. And there's a certain culture that comes with that environment that you're trying to reconcile. I don't live by farms.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:56]:That's not where my life has been called. But you have a certain sense of what home felt like for you as a kid and what that meant for security and what mom meant and how you reconcile the reality and truth of your own calling and choices and environment and situation. Although you probably will live on a farm because you're marrying an apple farmer. I married very much not someone who does those things. We love you, but that's not what you know about. And so reconciling all that, I think, is a big deal. I think especially when you're thinking about what's it look like for you to feel like you're being a mom, what's it look like for you to feel like you're creating a sense of family and what rules you break and what notes you pick up from your childhood that you want to repeat. So those are big questions.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:10:45]:Yeah, I do a lot of reflection on that. And how does what I experience then impact what I'm doing now? And is it what I want to be doing or is it just a reflection of what I learned before? And so maybe we just get into it just a little bit on the farm aspect, because I'm curious about that, if it has any relevance to your life today, because I think about, we talk about hybrid work and some people are going to four day work weeks here and things like that. And I had a conversation with a gentleman the other day, and he's like, we went from farming, which was seven days a week of work, to now we're at five, and now we want to go to four, which I think is great and it works for some people in industries. But what I saw growing up was my dad was up and out the door, and then you didn't see him again until it was dark. And as a kid, I was out there, I was doing chores, but then I would be outside all day and playing and things like that and then coming back. And so I wonder if that impacts at all how you look at work and what work looks like now.

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:42]:Yeah, I would say I grew up similarly to you in the sense of like work was in some ways play. It was like what we did and we didn't talk about going in and resting. You have fun while you're doing the things. My brothers would build ramps out of dirt and for 20 minutes go ride their dirt bikes and then go back and do it. So it wasn't this segmentation of work and play. My dad farmed when I was really young, and then he started several different businesses when I was young. And so it was like, same. My dad would be gone, we would go like in the middle of the night.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:22]:It felt like it was probably like 07:30 p.m. And drive out to the field and take him dinner and be with him for 20 minutes. I grew up in an environment that just valued work. We work together. I get a lot of satisfaction out of working. I don't register work and rest and play as these different thermometers. I'm trying to fill up to feel balanced. And I think for a while I felt like I needed to.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:46]:Like, I'm not resting enough, I'm not taking enough self care days. That's just not really what it looks like for me. That's not how I recharge. It's not where I get feedback from life about my talents and my energy and my contribution. It's just not either how I'm wired or maybe I was raised so hard in the environments that we're talking about that I just don't know how to do it. I don't know which one. So I think that I don't fight for rest, but I do work to contain my work. Now that I have so many kids doing so many things, I work to contain work so that I can have space to be physically available to go to places where they are.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:29]:Like driving kids to practice being able to just be flexible from that. I work to contain things, but I might be on a call on the way there. I might grab a quick call in the lobby, I might send three text messages. I'm just always keeping things moving and I don't resent that. I feel like that's something that I've chosen and that feels like right for me. So I don't know if that answers your question.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:13:53]:Yeah, it does. When you think about when you first started elementary or maybe started in your career before the kids and all that, what was work like then? Because for me, right now, I'll share an example. Like last Saturday, I took a couple of hours and just was doing some work. And I felt really at the end of it, reflecting and taking a moment to think about it. Was that the best choice? Did I use my time wisely that I have. And the answer was yes. I enjoyed the work that I was doing in that time, and it's outside of the technical nine to 5 hours. But I felt better walking into this week because I had taken that time then to prepare and to get done some really big projects off of my plate.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:14:35]:So that I walked into Monday feeling ready to go with everything else I had to do.

Tiffany Sauder [00:14:39]:I worked my face off, and I mean, like 60, 70 hours a week, really, I would say, until even after my first two kids were born, there is like a certain number of hours of work you have to do to reach a level of competency where suddenly you can be fast at things. But I don't know how many hours that is. I think some people have said 10,000 hours, but I would just like, I don't know when I'm going to get enough inputs, when my mind is going to be able to make decisions faster, when I can synthesize a smaller number of data points, when I have just a better gut and judgment and can step into stuff and step out quickly. But when you're early in your career, when you're 25 years old, I mean, I don't know, you've seen like 700 days of work. It's like hardly any. And so it's like you have to put in the hours and the time and do the projects and make the mistakes and do it another way and set up the spreadsheet and do some work on a Saturday morning and get ready for your week on Sunday. And I say do that stuff to the extent that it gives you energy and it's helping you move your priorities faster. Do that stuff.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:45]:My 40s looked so different than a lot of my peers because my 20s looked really different than a lot of my peers, and my 30s looked really different than a lot of my peers. So I started to realize, if I want to get somewhere other people aren't, I cannot pick up their template for their time and not even beat them, but just get further, faster. I wanted flexibility when my kids were older. I wanted to be able to pay for help. I want to be able to sign my kids up for these crazy travel sports that cost so much money and have it be no big deal. I can do that in my 40s because of the choices my husband and I made when we are in our twenty s, to really invest in our ability to earn in our careers, in our networks, and our expertise and being known for something, that stuff does not come accidentally. And I think a mistake that people can make is to say I need to prepare now in your unmarried environment with no children, and I need to be sure I could have a kid in my life before I do, to be sure I have space for when I do have one. It's like, that is madness to me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:51]:You don't have a human being to care for. You should run as hard and fast, with as much intensity as possible towards the thing I do have in hand, which is a career. I love learning, getting my brain more inputs, more exposure, say yes to stuff that maybe takes my time, so that later, when I don't want to say yes to those things, I can at least have them inside of my bucket of experience.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:17:16]:Yeah, and I think about that all the time because I'm doing these things and running hard and saying yes to all of the things, like you said, very similarly, knowing that when that kids come or the next step in the career happens, that it's not going to be this way forever, and taking advantage of the time that I have because our obligations are way lower than what they will be in the future.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:42]:I think a big mistake people make, too, is believing that you're very busy when you have small children.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:17:48]:Tell me more about that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:49]:They have one schedule. They go where you go and they have no other commitments. Your schedule is still the main event unless you decide that you want your small child to be the main event. Which, again, in our house we had nannies. We still have a nanny for our youngest one because it gave me the most amount of flexibility. But you are not busy. Your weekends are home. They do not have big financial needs.

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:16]:Like, there's not sports to pay for, there's not logistics, there's not places to get them. I have one daughter that has to be at the high school every morning by 06:00 a.m. I have another one that has practice 30 minutes away most days of the week, 50% of the weekends. Six months out of the year, we're not even close to our house. That is busy where you have no margin. When your kids start to have friends, places they want to go to, places they need to be driven, different schedules and calendars, that is when things get nuts. But when you have small children, you really get to decide the container that they take up.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:18:50]:That is such a good perspective shift, because in my mind, the crazy happens immediately with all of the. Now we have all these things to do. But yeah, if they're six months old, they're not going to have a friend's birthday party that they have to go to. And you have to deal with all of the logistics and things that come with that later. So along those lines, one of my questions that I have for you is when you were thinking about kids and maybe planning for them, was that an intentional choice that you and Jr. Made together on when that timing would be based on career, or was it outside of a career choice?

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:28]:Yeah. Before I go there, grace, let me speak real quickly to this. Like, I think this is the kid thing and activities. I think this is informed by my farm girl self. Okay. So my farm girl self, I went to library hour, maybe we went to literally no facilitated events. It was like, go outside and play. That was like our whole childhood.

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:51]:There was not activities. We had no idea that there was such thing as an hour long session. I have no idea. So now we live in this crazy world where people put, like, their three year old in ballet, and I think it's nuts. So that's a place where I think my farm girl self has chosen for my young kids to stay very unprogrammed until they're like nine years old, which as you start to get kids and they get into schools like mine, that is a very atypical choice. But I am not going to run myself ragged leaving work 2 hours early to go get my three year old to go to a 40 minutes ballet class where she's basically going to pick her nose in the mirror for 40 minutes. Like, what are we doing? Yeah, we can do this at home. We can turn on Elsa.

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:38]:I can buy her an $8 tutu from a second hand store, and we can have quote unquote ballet class. I think my farm girl perspective is like, you all are nuts. The amount of resources, the amount of time that we are taking up in this silly charade where you could do all this inside of your house or like, get a two x four and paint it pink and call it a stage. You know what I mean?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:21:00]:Yes. That is such a great point. Because my entire childhood, I was either reading books or I was playing with the neighborhood kids. We were outside just making up our own stuff, just doing stuff, all kinds of games.

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:13]:So I spend more time on making sure we have crafts, and I go to hobby lobby and buy a bunch of wooden stuff for them to paint. And it's not that the house can't be fun, but I don't have to go somewhere or sign them up for something that becomes a time commitment for me. I have to drive them. I have to wait for them and all this stuff until they're much older. Until it's like, okay, this is about you learning teamwork and actually creating a skill. But we can do ballet in the mirror at home. So anyway, I think that's where my past, my farm girl self is. Like, you all are nuts.

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:47]:We're not doing this.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:21:48]:Yeah, I love that perspective because I don't know so many different things, but swim lessons and dance and all of the options that are available to kids, which I think is great, but then it takes at least 2 hours out of your time between drive, at least around here drive and then the actual class and then coming home, plus all the other stuff to coordinate it. And it just, to me, looks like more than a headache than what I would want to deal with, even for myself, let alone a three year old.

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:15]:When I was younger, I would think about it. I was like, I'm doing this so that I can be sure I can pay for their college. I'm doing this so that I can teach them how to ski. I'm saying no to this stuff now because it gives me three, six, nine more hours in the week to be able to do my job. Because later, five years, ten years from now, I want to be able to give them things that change their lives, change their world, change their perspective. Does that make sense?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:22:40]:Yeah, it does. Do they feel like they missed out by any means? And I know they're not quite old enough to maybe be that reflective or when they were that age where they, like, my friends are in this class or something like that, or I want to do these things and saying no to them. Was there a moment where you had to say no?

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:59]:Probably a little bit, but usually, and again, this more goes to my. I, like, love entertaining. Usually it was about wanting to be with a friend. And so I would say like, oh, that's cool. You want to be with Adelaide, let's have her over and you guys can hang out. But the truth of is they go to soccer with them. I mean, what are they going to hang out for eight minutes? You know what mean? Like, if you want to have a friend over, let's have a friend over. But we don't need to go to a program.

Tiffany Sauder [00:23:26]:And I will let them do stuff that has them just stay after school. So my eight year old is in an art club, but she just stays after school so she doesn't have to be taken somewhere. She does have to be picked up, but that's just more accessible for me than having to take them to a totally different place and do all this stuff. So again, it's not. Never, ever will I let them. But especially my older girls that are now 15 and twelve, they were involved in literally nothing until they were eight or nine years old. We weren't going to find the money, and we weren't going to make the capacity. We've had kids over twelve years, you know what I mean? Our little ones are still very little, so who knows? They'll probably get privileges.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:05]:My older one's different. But when we were young and we were, like, scraping together Paytex and trying to find time to really build careers, I looked at that stuff as just bananas. Trade offs.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:24:18]:Yeah. That is genius. Thank you for the perspective shift. That makes me feel a little bit less nervous about walking into those first few years.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:25]:Yeah, they just want to be loved. And also I found if, as a working mom, when I took them to that stuff, and then I'll get off the soapbox. I was watching them be with somebody else. Why don't I dance in the kitchen with them? This is so silly. I basically flew home from work, I shoved you into a car seat, which you may or may not wanted to be, and then I ran you into this place, and then I handed you to another grown up to go do something with while I sat in a terrible chair watching you. Why don't I just do it with you? Why don't we go to a pool? Or why don't we go to it? You know what I'm saying? Okay, I'm off my soapbox on this.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:25:00]:Yeah. I love it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:01]:Okay. You asked me, how did we decide when to have kids?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:25:04]:Yes.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:05]:I wish I had a more profound memory on this. We never had a hard time getting pregnant, which I know can be a thing for people. I would say with all of them, I did not feel ready. That does not mean that it was, like a forced thing, but I was not like, oh, I feel ready. I never felt ready. I think that we had our first one when I was 29 and my mom was done having kids by 28. And I think that part of me was just panicking that I was going to be in the geriatric ward very soon. So I think my childhood perspective freaked me out a little bit.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:40]:And I was like, we got to get on this. We need to have kids. So then we had Aubrey when I was 29, and then we had our second one. Two and a half years later, my sister and I are two and a half years apart. I think it was largely informed by my sister and I were two and a half years apart. It wasn't like I really feel like I want another one. We knew we wanted to have more than one, and then we got to get to it, and we should probably start have the other one. When my mom had my second, it was not, like, strategic against my job or availability or our financial position as a family.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:12]:That is not true at all. When we had my oldest, it was probably the most uncertainty ever in our household, financially, with my husband's job. Not that he didn't have a job, but he had started this fund. It was in 2009, which was a terrible time in our economy. My agency was really struggling. Everything was bad, so that was not strategic. I think that was just like, my mom had babies at this age, and I should start. And then Ivy, our third one, she was four years after our second one, and it was just like, I mean, hello, y'all.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:48]:Like, you get better. Start having another one if you want to have another one. So that was the third one. And then we thought we were done, except we weren't. And so our fourth one was a surprise. So I don't know any of that is repeatable, but it was a little bit of a chaotic way of having. Now we have four girls. I love being an older mom, though.

Tiffany Sauder [00:27:06]:Like I said, I had a very young mom, and I had Quincy, our youngest, at 40. And I think about, if she has a baby at 40, I'll be 80 potentially when I meet a grandchild. Like, that's crazy. So I just need to live a really long time.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:27:22]:I like that theory, because Eric, my, is, we're five years apart, so he's five years older than me. And so basically what it comes down to is the decision is, mine is essentially, whenever you're ready, I'm ready, and we'll make it work. And I think about, I mean, you hear all of the wonderful things about motherhood. Yes. But then, like I said before, all of the negative things that can come with it and all of the additional stressors and the studies on what it does to motherhood and careers. And I would hope that it's different for those like us in an entrepreneurship type of career. But that's something that kind of plagues me a little bit, because on having a child, raising a child, all those things, I worked at a daycare for a number of years and actually was in the infant classroom. So that doesn't concern me nearly as much as the impact of everything else.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:16]:One of the things that came to mind as you were talking, Grace, is like, I've chosen to think about it differently instead of saying, that being a mom took from me the hours that I could have put into element three. Like, element three could be three times the size it is right now. I could have sold it to a private equity company. That's something I thought about before. Not that I don't know that anybody want to buy it, but let's imagine I did. And I was like, I don't know that I want to work, lead a private equity backed company and be a mom. Those things are incongruent, I think, for the way that I want to be a mom. And so I think you could tell that story in a way that said, being a mom took that opportunity from me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:54]:Or I can say, you know what? I freely exchanged these things in my life. I chose to be a mom of a big family, and I really want that. And there are some things that I will maybe need to exchange for that choice. That's okay. That's a good exchange for me. That's aligned with what I want out of life. It doesn't have to be that. It took that from me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:29:20]:You know what I mean? I'll freely exchange that all day long. And so I think looking at the things in your life and saying, what will I exchange? And one of the things I talk about is, I think we make bad exchanges. So, for instance, people will have kids and they will exchange their alone time. That could be time in their spiritual walk, could be exercise, could be meditation, whatever the things. And they'll exchange that for being more available for their kids. But what they're still doing is like folding their own underwear, they're getting their nails done. These are things I don't really care about. And so it's like they're bad exchanges.

Tiffany Sauder [00:29:57]:I've given away everything I don't care about. I've given away so that I can keep everything I want. I don't fold my own underwear. I don't put my own instacart away. I don't do those things. I've worked really hard to make good exchanges of time, and I think we keep hold of the wrong things and give away our personal time, give away quality time with our kids, give away experiences, and we keep the bad stuff sometimes, like the stuff that's more in the margin of life.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:30:25]:Yeah, I can agree with that. Which is also part of why I wanted to talk to you. And I appreciate, I mean, I'm an avid podcast listener of the episodes that you release and things like that. And having that reframe, I think, is really important because I said before, I only have one frame of reference for what it looks like for childhood, because of my own childhood. But it can be different, and we can do it differently and be more intentional about it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:30:49]:I'd encourage you, Grace, to, as you start thinking about your family, really think about what were the things that felt like home to you. And I'll tell you what. Mine. Because I had this desire to give my kids my childhood. I loved my childhood. I loved everything about it. I loved that we were around so much family. My mom was amazing.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:08]:Our family is really close. I'm the oldest, you're the youngest. The sibling vibe was, like, awesome. It was just a great. We were really close to my grandparents. We played outside. I knew how to ride dirt bikes and run bobcats and all this stuff. Now here I am.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:24]:I'm in city girl, living in the city, raising city kids. We have a golf club membership. Who would have ever guessed that I drive a big SUV, not a pickup truck. I have a parking pass. These things were not in my childhood. What is happening? But what I realized childhood for me was my mom cooking. And it wasn't. Not that, but the smell and the sounds of that was home to me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:51]:Garlic and onion and pans and soup and strainers and garlic press. That was the center of our household. And so that is the thing I have not given away. I still cook for our family. I love to cook. I feel so grateful that I do. But that is how I connect the idea of home inside of our family. And that is like, my piece of my childhood that I feel like I'm bringing so acutely into our own home.

Tiffany Sauder [00:32:19]:So it could be like you become a hobbyist in, like, a chicken coop or something. I don't know. I don't know what the thing is. But is there something that you kind of bring into your own unless you end up working with your husband and his apple farm? I don't know. But if you're like, I have this professional job through a computer, it's not shared experientially in the same way that your mom's job was. There may be ways that you kind of have to dig deeper into your childhood. Be like, what is it that I want to bring forward that my kids talk about that make me just be like, yes, that was home. That was home.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:32:55]:Yeah. You kind of almost hit it right on the head there with the chicken coop and the wildflowers, because I am very much. To me, what was really important about my childhood was being outside and being outdoors and having my neighbors were my cousins. So we were playing every day of the summer, and that was the summer I wasn't in school programs or summer programs or things like that. That's what I was doing. And if I wasn't doing that, then I was reading, and that was, like, the coolest part. And having that ability to work alongside my parents, too, and to see them actually work and the work that they were doing and how it mattered each and every single day.

Tiffany Sauder [00:33:35]:Yeah. So I think those are awesome conversations for you and your husband of how you stitch your family culture together and just working hard to hang on to those things that are meaningful to you, that you want to bring forward into your own kids'experience. I kind of happened on mine accidentally, but I was like, that is why this is so oddly precious to me, to cook for my family. I was like, is because it was, like, the most thing about my childhood that I remember. My grandma was always cooking, my mom was always cooking. And it's like, I could go work 12 hours, but if I can cook, it's, like, my way of just being like, this is how I make home for my family.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:34:15]:Yeah. How I make home. That's a great idea for us to think about a lot more as we look at developing a family. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:34:24]:Cool.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:34:25]:My next question kind of. It brings us back onto the career track, but if my math is correct, we're probably around a similar age when you started element three, and I don't know if it's maybe a product of the environment I'm in or maybe just a little bit of internal for myself, but I find that people will refer to me as being a young person or a kid at times. I've gotten that. And for you, when you started element three, did you have anything like that or any kind of, I don't know, like, impostor syndrome as you were starting it up, being younger in your career? Because for me, I don't feel young. I have never felt young. I have an old soul, as some people will call it. And so some people have the recognition of, like, you're 25, you're so young. You have your whole life ahead of you.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:35:13]:I don't know that I've ever necessarily felt that young feeling.

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:18]:So I feel like the word imposter syndrome was not around when I started. But you're right. I was 25 years old, so we're same age for sure. I definitely got that I was the young one, and I actually started to love that. I get the sense from you, Grace, too, that you know how to handle yourself in a way that is older than your age. And I was always good at that, too. I asked good questions. I had a presence about me, I think, that was older than my years.

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:45]:And so I kind of liked the game of surprising them. And at some point, you won't be the young one in the room anymore, and you'll have to find a new deck of cards.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:35:56]:Okay, fair enough.

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:58]:It's like, oh, this isn't working in the same way. But I kind of liked the game of just surprising people that I knew more than they thought I would, that I was more prepared than they expected me to be, that I had seen inside of businesses bigger than they thought I would have. And I just kind of liked, and I just let it be. I didn't take it as, nobody meant it as an insult. If anything, it was sort of them, like, externally processing, like, how are you 25? I'm going to trust you with a bunch of money. How are you 25? And I'm going to trust you with this big, objective, kind of externalizing a little bit, like, is this a smart choice? So there was definitely that. I was young, I was excitable, I was all the things you don't feel young, but I promise your 43 year old self will look back at your today self and say, I was young. That doesn't mean you don't know things.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:48]:That doesn't mean you're not super capable. That doesn't mean you're not 100% qualified with what you're doing. But I was young. That is true. There were things I didn't know that I know today, and that's okay. I never would have taken the risks I took if I had known everything. There's a lot of things I wouldn't have done, but I didn't know any of that. Praise the Lord.

Tiffany Sauder [00:37:06]:And so I just kept going, thinking that I knew it. And then you learn it, because you're on the pursuit of the information and the knowledge. So, yes, I was seen as young, I think, as it relates to impostor syndrome. One of the most powerful things one of my early mentors said to me is he said, you reveal what you know by the questions you ask, not by the statements you make what you tell. And that, I think, is just really good advice. Whenever I'm feeling uncertain, whenever I can ask questions, it shifts the focus from myself to the other person, the other situation, to curiosity, to a better understanding of the environment. And whenever I can just get the focus off myself, all that goes away because I'm more naturally in a helper posture and position versus, like, oh, my word, what are they thinking about me? Because impostor syndrome really is about you looking at yourself in the context of how you want other people to view you when you're just there to help. Hey, I'm just here for the party.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:08]:How can I be helpful? I think it's difficult to feel impostor syndrome in that setting because you're just there to be like, what do I know that can be helpful? What questions do I see that can sort of break this open faster? And whenever I can get myself to a place where I'm more open handed and generous in the way that I'm participating, that tends to evaporate for me, at least.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:38:30]:Yeah, that's a good point, because that's exactly what I do when I'm in the session room with clients, is asking questions, giving them the education. Like, I know my stuff backwards and forwards, absolutely, but helping them learn it and understand it, and asking the questions that might frame it differently for them. So in the session room with clients, I got it down. It's just then maybe translating it outside of that room that I need to have a little bit more intention with.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:57]:So let's talk about this so specifically with the sales process, or tell me what that looks like. Or like when you're giving results, or, what does that look like?

Grace VanDenBrink [00:39:05]:Yeah, it's when somebody says something about specifically me being young or my age, or they'll make some type of age related comment, or, like, us old people are some things that I hear, and so I don't consider myself, like, I'm not actively thinking about my age in the settings that I'm in until it gets brought up, and then I'm like, oh, where did that come from? And is there something that I'm missing here? Because that's a comment that was made, but maybe you're right and that's more about them than it is about a comment on myself.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:35]:Totally. Because I think people in marketing will be like, oh, marketing is a young person's game. Or all this new stuff that's coming in, and it's like, I would just let it kind of wave by. I think it's more about them. They'll say things like, I've got a kid your age. It's like, okay, interesting. I don't know.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:39:51]:Yes, I've heard that one too. Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:53]:And they're just, like, making sense of it. It's not like they're thinking about you in a childlike way. It's just like, oh, here we are, these young kids. And now that I'm a mom, it's like if my 15 year old in ten years was in the room educating me on something, I'd be like, oh, well, okay, Aubrey, look at you being. Saying things to me so I can see how they're just like, oh, look, may have got a kid your age. This is like them being here. I don't think it's personal. I think it's just like them assimilating, because I suspect what you also hear a lot of grace is like, wow, you're really impressive.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:29]:How do you have so much knowledge on this topic? Yeah, because I've had a lot of cycles. I've done a lot of marketing. In your line of work, it's like I've just seen a lot of it. This is what I know, this is what I see. I can see the patterns. I'm good at articulating myself. I'm an active listener. I think it's more that I would let it just kind of roll off.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:40:48]:Yeah, that's a good reassurance on that one. What was it that pushed you to.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:53]:Start element three, insanity. I don't know. I wish I would have journaled it more clearly because I remember the things that happened, but I really feel like this is where I was supposed to be in a very strange series of events happened such that God was like, and here you are. This is where I need you. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial environment, and so because of that, you're very close to the action. And so I started my career in a very big company, publicly traded billions and billions of dollars in revenue. And it's amazing, but you don't make a lot of decisions when you're 25 in an environment like that. And so I just learned, like, man, I just need to be closer to the ground.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:33]:I need a place where I get more feedback on if my ideas are good or bad. And so that experientially kind of got me closer to this idea of, like, I just think I'm entrepreneurial. I just want to know. I have a pretty short memory as it relates to my bad decisions, which makes me a great entrepreneur. And so I think you've put yourself into different environments where you start to learn. Like, where do I light up? Where are my giftings really brought forward? I'm an externalizer. And so being in an industry where I have to meet people and I have to meet new people because I needed to do sales, and I'm naturally curious. And so sticking my head into a lot of different businesses and industries was just really stimulating to me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:42:16]:And I think I could have done a lot of things, but I think that's why I ended up in marketing and in an agency and in a client service world where I love solving problems. I like the performance of being in client services and big presentations and conflict management. I just love all that stuff. There's a lot of drama in it, you know what I mean? So to speak. It's like, cool. I love it. So I don't think I knew enough about the industry to say, oh, I did the SWOT analysis and I saw that this industry is going to be perfect for me. I'm not nearly that thoughtful.

Tiffany Sauder [00:42:50]:I'm more immersive. Like, let me jump in and see if the water feels good. But my dad was an entrepreneur, and so risk is almost unidentifiable for me and my siblings. It's like we just grew up around so much of it. And so that's why it didn't seem like that crazy to start a business at 25 years old. It was very much in the vocabulary of my family. It was encouraged by my dad, those kinds of things. It wasn't like I was weird for doing it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:43:16]:It was very normal.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:43:17]:Yeah. And then what was the jump from being, and maybe I don't have the background correct. Like you by yourself at 25, starting element three, and then growing it to the next two, the next three, and then to where you're at today, rather than staying as some people I see stay as solo entrepreneurs or solo consultant type based work.

Tiffany Sauder [00:43:39]:Yeah, actually, that decision was pretty strategic. I wanted there to be a day in my 40 year old self where I was being paid by a company that I did not have to put 50, 60, 70 hours a week in exchanging my hours for dollars. I am a practitioner. I had to learn how to be a brand practitioner, but I'm really a much better business leader. There was probably a decade where I was paid materially less. If I would have just been a solopreneur who did brand strategy for big companies, I could have made two, three times my salary for a long period of time. But I would have not been building a business. I would have been building a very comfortable income for myself and all that kind of stuff.

Tiffany Sauder [00:44:25]:I could have been very comfortable, but I wanted to build a business. I wanted to build something that was going to create an income stream for me that was passive. I love building people. The fact that Kyler gets to run this business, he's not a starter he doesn't do the first $3 million very well, but he's amazing at this stage to be able to give him an opportunity to go do what he knows how to do. The very coolest thing for me. I love that. I think there's a big opportunity for him to create wealth for his family that's very encouraging and exciting and motivating to me. So I never wanted to just set up a shingle and have a couple of people working for me and me be the main practitioner.

Tiffany Sauder [00:45:09]:It was always about building the business, but I think because I saw my dad build businesses that were funding our family's lifestyle because he'd built them for 20 years and then still owned the majority. So I think I saw that, and I was like, man, if you get that right, it really creates some really cool opportunities. But starting things is really hard, and you don't make a lot of money for kind of a long time sometimes.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:45:31]:Yeah, that's maybe the opposite of what I saw. But my dad loved his work and loved being a farmer and doing the work, but he was continuously building it, but also continuously doing the work and things like that and not stepping back as much because that's the life that he wanted to have. And I always thought that when I was growing up, my perspective was like, oh, that's what owning a business is, is like seven days a week of work, and it's all day, every day, those types of things. And then now that I'm getting to know other business owners, people in all of my circles, seeing the different ways that it can be working with clients and things like that, that it's much more of an intentional choice than a has to be this way.

Tiffany Sauder [00:46:13]:It's different choices, for sure. And you sometimes do make less money. Sometimes I don't know. I didn't know how to make money and grow it. You can do that. I just didn't know how at the time. It's possible. Okay, good.

Tiffany Sauder [00:46:26]:It is possible. I just didn't know how to do that.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:46:29]:I know we're getting close to the end of our time, so maybe this might be the last question, and you said before that you were used to risk, and maybe this won't be a relevant question, but I want to ask it anyways. Entrepreneurship can be one giant risk. Is there one that stands out to you from starting element three to now where it was a risk that you took that felt like a really big one? And what was it and what happened after?

Tiffany Sauder [00:46:59]:I don't know that there's anything that has felt like a really big risk from the inside of the jar. I think people look at me stepping down as the president of the agency as a really big risk. I mean, the whole leadership team used to report to me. A lot of them started working here because they believed in me. Kyler has made some really big choices as it relates to the strategy of the agency. And I think on the outside, that could look like a really big deal. It is a big deal. He's leading the culture.

Tiffany Sauder [00:47:36]:I spent almost 20 years of my life building this, and all future earnings are really determined by his leadership. And he's only 32 years old, 33 years old. What the world. When you tell that story, that seems pretty crazy. I have learned. I'm very good at people not making them good, but I think picking good people, I have learned, and maybe you'll have to learn to step into this. I think I have a really good intuition, and when I was younger, I didn't trust that enough. I felt like I needed to have a lot of data points on a graph that I could prove to somebody, and I would wait too long to make choices or step into just things like felt or saw or had a gut about.

Tiffany Sauder [00:48:23]:And I think I'm much faster at that now. I also learned a really important framework from Jim Collins's work. He wrote a book, great by choice, and it probably is one maybe the most influential business book I've read. I've probably read it three times. And he talks about bullets than cannons and whenever there's a choice that needs to be made, strategic decision, putting Kyler into leadership, just a big choice that you need to make a big change in my schedule. What's a bullet that you can shoot at that endpoint that helps give you some feedback on, is it a good choice or know? He had taken over. He'd stepped in for me on some meetings before he was officially president. I had given him some big projects to lead.

Tiffany Sauder [00:49:17]:I had not been available to attend some meetings that I wanted to see how he did on his own. And so I was testing into this idea of announcing to the leadership team, you're not going to report to me anymore. I'm not going to be in your meetings anymore, announcing to the company, hey, I'm not going to be involved in the same way that I was. I'm going to go do some more work that's from the outside in. And so I think testing into these things that look like big, giant risks, I think people, when you watch a lot of shark tank or read Richard Branson's biography, you're, you know, entrepreneurs are just like launching cannons, taking risks, and you either end up on a know, doing the backstroke in gold coins or you end up broke. And those are sort of how it goes. Either it works or it doesn't. And it's like a lot more, I think, nuanced than that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:50:11]:And I would say every major call I've made, I have been 100% sure that was the right decision. Whether it ended up being the right choice or not is immaterial to the fact that at that moment, with the information that I had, at that moment on the road, it was the right decision. Which may not mean that I got the outcome I wanted, but looking back, I would still have made that decision. Then as you get more information, you just might have to undo it or change it or go in a different direction or amend it or whatever it is. But I think people freeze. I think people are unwilling to look at themselves as the problem. And I think people take shark bites out of things when they need to take like a minnow size little nibble, and they've expended all their resources, they don't have any cash to make a different choice. They've just gone too far and there's no resources to pull it back in if you find it's the wrong thing.

Tiffany Sauder [00:51:02]:So I think, as I've learned, as I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years, as I've been around hundreds if not thousands of business owners, there's a lot less risk in it when you know how to play the game, even when you're making big bets.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:51:18]:Yeah, what I heard out of that is still taking risks and things like that, but doing it in a strategic way, which is what everybody always says, but what that really means is step by step, piece by piece, rather than jumping 2ft in all the way. Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder [00:51:35]:Even this project, I have had this vision in myself for a very long time of creating something like this and resources, and for a year and a half, it was just a podcast episode, like once a week, maybe not even every week, but that's all I had the capacity to do. I didn't have time to market it. I didn't have the time to go do talks on it. I didn't have time to make a website about it. I just knew I could put 1 hour a week aside to say some words into a microphone and just figure out, is it helpful to people? I was like, I'm going to do this for a year. I'm going to do it for a year.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:52:10]:And a half.

Tiffany Sauder [00:52:10]:And if I hear from people like, hey, this is helpful. What else do you have? I saw this thing, I'm like, then I'll just keep feeding it and seeing if it starts to get traction and if it's helping people, and at some point we'll take on a life of its own. But I just tested it for a very long time before I actually shifted my time towards it.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:52:30]:Yeah. And when I reflect on our own journey with no honesty, I would say thinking about it a little bit more deeply, that's pretty similar to what we ended up doing to now we're at the point where it is proven out there, and now we're in the accelerated process of bringing it out there and having it out in the world more than in the last few years that we had before.

Tiffany Sauder [00:52:52]:Yeah, totally. You're like getting proof of concept around your framework, and you've tested different types of facilitation and how many people should be in it and all these kinds of things before you kind of go scale it. It's like that in every aspect of entrepreneurship, I think.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:53:08]:Yeah, well, I think it's very clear proof to me, at least in my life, that there's a need for the work that you're doing now with life of Anne, and I'm excited to engage more with it when we're in a two career family household.

Tiffany Sauder [00:53:22]:Awesome, Grace. Well, I think you're so courageous to just be thinking about these questions and asking them out loud. It's so important. And go get lots of people's stories. I'm a data point of one, but I think you're courageous and smart for starting to bring it into your life.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:53:36]:I appreciate that. Thank you so much. This was amazing.

Tiffany Sauder [00:53:39]:You're welcome, Grace. Appreciate your time. It was awesome to meet you, too.

Grace VanDenBrink [00:53:42]:You too.

Tiffany Sauder [00:53:45]:Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will. If you want to get the Inside Scoop, sign up for my newsletter. We decided to make content for you instead of social media algorithms. The link is waiting for you in show notes, or you can head over to tiffanystouder.com. Thanks for listening.

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