Denise Duffield-Thomas
Bonny Snowdon 00:07
Hello, I'm Bonny Snowdon, ex-corporate person, a mother turned successful artist-entrepreneur. It wasn't that long ago though that I lacked the confidence, vision and support network to focus on growing my dream business. Fast forward past many life curveballs, waves of self-doubt and so many lessons learned and you'll see Ignite, my thriving online colour pencil artists community, a community that changes members' lives for the better and gives me freedom to live abundantly whilst doing what I love and spending quality time with my beloved family and dogs, all whilst creating my best artwork with coloured pencils, and mentoring others to do the same. But this life wasn't always how it was for me, it used to only exist in my imagination. I've created the It's a Bonny Old Life podcast to help increase people's confidence, share mine and my communities experience and hope through fascinating personal stories, champion the other amazing humans in my personal, professional and membership community, and create another channel through which I can support others to realize their dreams. If you're a passionate colour pencil artist or an aspiring one who's looking to create their best work, and a joyful life you love, you're in the right place. Grab a cuppa and a custard cream, and let's get cracking.
I'm so excited about my next guest. I have been following her for probably just over a year. I'm a member of her money Bootcamp. I have all three of her books and I listened to them excessively on audio. She is the most amazing woman I have to say and I'm starting to take on some of her advice around boundaries and all of that kind of thing and she's just such an inspiration, I think to female entrepreneurs. I'm really, really delighted to be speaking very late because she's in Australia to Denise Duffield Thomas. Okie dookie. So, I've got the fabulous Denise Duffield Thomas here all the way from Australia. I'm up very late to speak to her and I'm incredibly excited. It's just so lovely to have you here.
Denise Duffield Thomas 02:09
Hey, Bonny. Great to see you. Thanks for staying up so late for me.
Bonny Snowdon 02:16
That's okay.
Denise Duffield Thomas 02:17
Our time zone is so horrible between us and my husband's English and so trying to have our kids talk to his mom and it's a nightmare. It's not very fun, which is a shame.
Bonny Snowdon 02:31
I know. I have quite a few students sort of dotted all around the world and I have some very diehard students that are kind of joining me at, goodness, knows what hour in the morning into my live streams, and I'm so grateful that they do but it's it is quite late for them. So, it's lovely, lovely to have you on my podcast. I am incredibly excited. Well, I'd love to know a little bit about your new book. Because I've read all. I think you've got three books which I've just I've got on audio and I just have them on all of the time and I have to say what I really love about your books; you've narrated them and sometimes you get an audiobook and the person speaking and the contents fantastic. But sometimes the voice is a bit, I don't know, it doesn't really grab you. It's literally somebody just reading from a book. But yours is like you're just sitting in the room just talking and it's so lovely to listen to it. So, I can listen to them over and over again and it's going to get boring.
Denise Duffield Thomas 03:39
Thank you. Well, you know what, it's so funny because you have to just sit in a room and talk for hours and hours and so it can take two, three full days to record an audiobook. But I feel like I've been training for that my whole life. I was the kid who was getting in trouble for talking in school, in class sometimes and so I think it's so cool now that we live in a world where we can create our own podcasts, we can do all our own stuff, all those things we used to get in trouble for in class.
Bonny Snowdon 04:12
Amazing. So, talk to me. I know you've got a new book, I've pre-ordered it and can't wait to get my mitts on it. Tell me about your new book.
Denise Duffield Thomas 04:22
Yeah, so my new book is called Chill and Prosper and it's an updated version of my previous book called Chill Printer. Chill Printer I started writing in 2017, handed it into my publisher Hay House in 2018 and it came out in 2019 and then something happened in 2019 that changed our world over the last couple of years. So, then my publisher asked me to do an updated version of the book to acknowledge the fact that we've gone through this big global event and the world has changed. In business advice, it's not that it's changed, but I think there are nuances to acknowledge. The other thing that was really cool about being able to do a new addition is that people would contact me and say, that's great Denise, but it doesn't work for my industry. It doesn't work for my personality. I'm exempt and I'm special and I can't make my business easier because my customers would say no, or my boss would say no, or I'm just not allowed to do it and so, I was thrilled to be able to do a completely new edition and the reason why we did a name change actually, is because when we did the first edition, I hated the cover. I really hated it. So, when we did a new one, I said to my publisher, okay, but it has to have a new cover and they said, well, we never liked the name Chill Printer. Can you come up with a different name, and I went, no for a loom. Oh, good. So, if anyone did by the previous version, it isn't like, it's a completely 100% new book. But there are so many upgrades to it plus, I did a ton of pre-order bonuses to make that really special and one of them I just added is a whole bunch of audios, with affirmations over meditation music, so you can listen and work and do things while you're listening to meditations and let me just tell you the URL before I forget, and then we can go on to whatever, it's denisedt.com/prosper, it has all the links to where you can buy it all over the place and then you can get those preorder bonuses, as well and we're going to do a live book club in July and if you're listening to it after July, you still get all those bonuses.
Bonny Snowdon 06:30
Oh, amazing, amazing and you are a money mindset coach, that's kind of what you build your business on and you are very much of the mindset of the law of attraction, manifestation, all of that kind of thing, which is just, oh my goodness, honestly, I think the last probably a year and a half, I've started to kind of understand vibration what I think attracts everything else back. I launched my business last September, well, part of my business and just sort of believed that it was going to be successful and it has been, and it's doing really, really well and I joined your money boot camp because I have some major money blocks. I mean, major money blocks. I feel so guilty earning money and joining your money boot camp and going through the different areas. And being a part of the Facebook group and everything like that, it's really, really helped me to understand just how important it is to work out what those blocks are and how you can overcome them and I don't know whether you can just sort of give us a little bit of an idea of you as a coach how you help people with their different sort of money blocks, I guess?
Denise Duffield Thomas 08:04
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I want to acknowledge the fact that you're not alone with feeling guilty about earning money. But the fact that you can even say it out loud and acknowledge it is so powerful, because often when you go into the personal development world or in the entrepreneurial world, it's totally taboo to mention your fears out loud, because the first law is kind of fake it till you to make it and what I do, though, is allow people to look at the mess, allow people to look at the fears, and honestly acknowledge them because that's the thing that's going to help us and if we don't, it just continues perpetuates the fact that money is a taboo topic that we're not allowed to talk about. So, that's my job, I hold space for people in that way of I write books, and I have courses, where we explore our fears and resistance to earning more money, because we all have it, including me, I still work on mine all the time and what's really fun about my work is that allows me one, to hear people's secrets and stories because that's the best thing ever, but also to see all of the connections, and the interplay between our experiences growing up between the culture that we grow up in, and how that impacts our money today and what's fascinating is I sometimes bring together groups of people to just to talk about their experiences, their commonalities. So, a couple of months ago, I got a bunch of my English clients together to talk about what blocks would come up from growing up in England, growing up in English and of course, there are nuances within nuances, of course, there are. But it was really fun to look at what are even the common values or even the cliches of being English and one of them was this idea that you guys love queuing. You love queuing. Is this true or is it not true, generally?
Bonny Snowdon 10:13
Well, it might be a queue, all true. Although saying that I had to go to the tip this morning with a car full of cardboard because the house was just full of cardboard. So, I was like, right I'm going to the tip, got there. There were so many cars there and I was like, I'm not queuing. So, I turned around, and I came straight home and my car is sitting outside the front still full of cardboard. So, I don't really like queueing. But yes, British people do tend to queue.
Denise Duffield Thomas 10:46
But you would never get there and go, I'm not queuing, I'm just going to go to the front of the line and I'm going to push all these cars out of the way. So, even just talking about that and saying, how does this relate to your money mindset? Do you feel like you have to wait your turn? Do you feel like there's a natural order to things that you have to wait for things to unfold for you? Are there unspoken agreements in your family about who is allowed to succeed first? Do you have unspoken agreements with your friends or your mentors, about who gets to succeed in what order? It's those little nuances that you can start to explore because then someone's like, well, I'm the baby of the family and I feel like I can't succeed because my brother is supposed to succeed first. It's all unspoken, it's all unconscious. But there's something there about it, it's impolite to put myself forward for things. It's impolite to make quantum leaps. It's impolite to go faster than other people. Again, this could all just be a story. But this is the work because as humans, we are wired to believe in story and metaphor and it can be very powerful to unpick that for ourselves and say, oh, this could be one of the reasons why I'm holding myself back from succeeding in my business. Whether or not that's true, but it's powerful to acknowledge that and to make meaning out of why sometimes we are scared of money.
Bonny Snowdon 12:22
Yeah, it is. I mean, I've had no money, literally no money, and then all of a sudden, have quite a lot of money and I'm getting better. But it still feels very strange and I still have to give things away, to make it feel better. But then there's also that thing, being an artist, there's also that thing that there's almost a stigma, if you don't do well. So, everybody wants to do well. But then when you get to do well, then it's like, well, there can't be proper artists then because they're just after the money. That really frustrates me because if you're running a business, and to run a business successfully, you make money.
Denise Duffield Thomas 13:15
Absolutely. But that's the thing. So, say we grew up in a culture where it's impolite to talk about money, which can be very English too, because I hear people saying, oh, well, I can't brag about my income, it's very American. I will hear that from British people. It's very impolite to talk about money. So, then how are you going to put a price on your work? How are you going to invoice? How are you going to chase up money? So that's one part of it and then you come into an industry that has its own rules, as well and one of the rules of the art world is, you're starving artists, unless you have a wealthy Patreon, and only a few amounts of artists, and to be honest, it's mostly men, let's face it, are allowed to be successful, because they're geniuses, but that's very rare and if you receive money, you're a commercial sellout, which is obviously seen as very bad. So, there are so many layers on that and then you're putting your own experiences from your own family. What did your family say about who was allowed to earn money? What professions were considered valid and what professions weren't in your family? It's this big old mess, and you have to look at your own stuff and start to untangle bits of that, and go, okay, what's real and what's not, what's mine and what someone else's? And am I allowed to prosper? Because then there could be political persuasions that your family grew up with saying all people who do this are bad, all people who do this are good and that's tricky to unpack and then we think, why can't I just hit publish on a social media post? Why can't I do that? Because there are so many layers. We haven't even talked about the layer of what happens to outspoken women in history. Doesn't that feel scary?
Bonny Snowdon 15:22
Yeah. I mean, there was something this morning, I was thinking, gosh, I wish I could write about this. But I don't think I can, because probably somebody won't be happy about what I'm writing about and actually, that's my problem. It's not somebody else's problem and I should feel empowered enough to be able to write whatever I want to write as long as it's not going to hurt anybody.
Denise Duffield Thomas 15:43
Absolutely, but it's scary. Because we see it every day, we see examples of politicians, or actresses and let's face it, a lot of the time, it is women who get vilified, or it's that metaphorical being burnt to the stake and it feels very real in our body, it feels very scary and we have to have compassion for that and we have to unpack it and there's a lot of other things you can do to feel safer in that space. But we have to acknowledge those fears, because they do stop us from doing what we want to do.
Bonny Snowdon 16:19
Yeah. How did you get into the coaching, to begin with? Is this something that you've always done?
Denise Duffield Thomas 16:26
It's something I've always wanted to do and so I really think of my personality, even at school was very much like coachy kind of personality and I would hear something on Oprah after school, and then I would regurgitate it to my friends the next day and try and coach them. I remember trying to coach, I don't even know where I got this from my cousin. I won't even mention his name, but he was a chronic bed wetter. Sorry, I'm sure he's not listening, I have many male cousins. But I remember, I don't know where I got this from, but I was like, oh, I'm going to do a guided meditation with him and I wasn't very old but it was just like, maybe this will help and it was really interesting. I don't know where I got a lot of these things from, but I think it was honestly from watching things like Oprah and reading personal development books, even in my teens. But I had my first life coach at 19 and I found it a very cheesy, weird experience because he would read out NLP for dummies. He'd open up his book NLP for dummies and do guided meditations. But also at 19, I had no way to put that motivation. I didn't have a business or anything. So, I was like, oh, I'm so motivated. But I still don't know what I'm going to do with my life. Because this is not a real job. So, I didn't become a coach until I was almost 30. That's when I did my coaching qualification and at the start, I didn't even realize that you were allowed to have ideal clients. I was like, bring me your problems, any problem, and we'll work on it together and then I started to go, oh, I don't like working with people who were in this situation or I really like working with people who are entrepreneurs, rather than people in a corporate job and then I was like, oh, I prefer working with women than men. No offence, men and then it was just a process of attrition and then I realized, too, I was working on my own money mindset myself. So, I thought I'll talk about this a little bit and I decided to do a course, a one-off course 10 years ago, called Money Bootcamp. I just thought, well, I'm still interested in this and with a lot of my previous things that I was talking or teaching about, I would lose interest, I would lose steam within a couple of months and 10 years later, I'm still going, wow, that's an interesting nuance. That's an interesting nuance and I came at it from a place of I'm not a financial adviser. I'm not an accountant. I can't tell people what to do with their money. But I can ask questions, and be curious and help people explore those things in a safe space and I'm just still waiting for me to be bored of it and I haven't yet. So, that's how I'm still doing it.
Bonny Snowdon 19:10
That's amazing, though, after 10 years, still being really excited about it.
Denise Duffield Thomas 19:15
I'm fascinated by it and because I meet people every day, and they tell me their stories, I've never considered that before. That's cool. Now I can tell someone else about it in a similar situation.
Bonny Snowdon 19:26
Yeah. You mentioned life coach NLP before. Have you done any training in NLP? Do you use NLP in any of your coaching?
Denise Duffield Thomas 19:35
No, I don't. Not explicitly. A lot of things like that are built into coach training for sure and I think too, that's why I actually don't call myself a coach anymore. I call myself a money mindset mentor. Because the work that I do isn't necessarily even coaching anymore. I'm not here to convince anybody or help. I'm literally creating a safe space for people to ask questions for themselves. So, I mean, I think some people use NLP in a really great way. I think some people use it in a very manipulative way. But I love all sorts of modalities and tools because I think everything works in its own way. Everything has its place as long as we're coming from a place of self-love and acceptance. Everything has its place.
Bonny Snowdon 20:23
So, you practice is EFT, isn't it? EFT?
Denise Duffield Thomas 20:28
Yes.
Bonny Snowdon 20:29
Now, I'd really like to know more about this, because I've downloaded all of your bits and pieces. I don't know whether it's my age, but I really struggled to remember what the affirmations were even though they're literally about three words.
Denise Duffield Thomas 20:44
I get that?
Bonny Snowdon 20:47
I really like the thought of it and I know it works and I'd like to do it more and actually having you sitting here now is a really great opportunity for me to say what can I do to make it more, I don't know, just easier for me to do it?
Denise Duffield Thomas 21:05
Yes, of course. So, when I was living in London in my 20s, I had this temp at work, who came in temporary secretary and we were talking about books and things like that. She said, have you ever tried tapping? I was like, yeah, I grew up as a dancer, I can do tap, jazz and ballet and she was like, no, emotional freedom technique and I was like, tell me more and back then there weren't any websites really about it. She had to lend me her six-part DVD series and I had to go home and watch it and back then it was even more complicated. There were way more points, there were finger points, and you had to hum Happy Birthday. You had to roll your eyes one way, and roll your eyes the other way. What I love about EFT now is that there are so many practitioners who teach probably what purists would call a quick and dirty version of tapping and what it is, at its purest level, it's a pattern interrupter. It's a pattern interrupter. There are better people than me to talk about the science of acupressure and the meridians and things like that. For me, I come at it from not an expert point of view, from a layman's point of view of going this is to interrupt a pattern of thought in your brain. That's what I use it for. So, you say a negative statement, even though I have this fear of money, even though I feel terrible about invoicing people, even though I have all of this guilt around money. So, you say the negative thing and people freak out about that because they are, I don't want to manifest the bad thing by saying it out loud and this is the disservice that some people in the Law of Attraction world have given to us. Because we feel like we have to be pure in thought and deed all of the time and it's impossible to do that. We're human beings and all we're doing is just allowing it to come out because it's living there anyway, every moment of our life. So, we say the negative thing, even though I have this, this fear, and you can be very specific, even though I can't invoice that person because she is my friend. Even though I can't put a price on this because everyone's going to hate me or you can just be general, even though I have this fear of money and then the second part is, I deeply and completely love and accept myself and it's actually the second part that's the most important because so many of our fears and our resistance is this fear that we're just not enough. We're not enough, we're not likeable, we're not lovable, we're doing everything wrong, we're horrible, bad people, all of those things, that's really the crux of so many of our fears and then at the same time you do tapping points on your face. Even though I have this fear, I deeply and completely love and accept myself. So, it feels like there's a lot to it but even if all you did was tap on one point which they call the Karate Chop Point and just say I deeply and completely love and accept myself and if you can't remember that, I love and accept myself. I love and accept myself and the way that I make it a habit for myself is that I do it with my kids as part of their nightly routine and sometimes we can say, did anything happen at school today that you're upset about or they'll say I did this thing but most of the time we just say that I love it I deeply and completely love and accept myself and my three year old just does that and we do it just turn around and she just goes, I deeply and completely love and accept myself because she's got a little less than a speech impediment. But that is going to set them on such a great path, just be able to go, I'm okay here. But it can be as complicated as you like. But the cool thing is now there are so many people on YouTube who have created scripts for anything. You can write an EFT script for invoicing, an EFT script for breaking through an income plateau, someone would have created a script, and you can just copy along with them and do it. Sometimes people yawn after it, sometimes people feel sick, sometimes you just feel relief, and sometimes, you're really thirsty after it. But there's no right or wrong and that's why I say anything works. Because you might go, I'm just going to do mirror work, which is what Louise Hay talked about for years. She said, just get a mirror and just say, I love and accept you and that's what I started with. Before I even did EFT, I was like, this is really hard for me to look myself in the mirror and say, I love you, I accept you. Because I was just full of, you're not good enough, you're unlovable, you're horrible, you're a bad person. It takes a while to chip away at that.
Bonny Snowdon 26:07
What was a turning point then? Was there a point in your life where you were, I don't know, not particularly happy or a bit miserable, or something that then made you sort of look into all of this and go, no, I need to change things?
Denise Duffield Thomas 26:23
I mean, plenty of moments. I grew up with not much money. My mum married a wealthy man when I was about 11 and they were together for about four or five years in and out. So, we would go live in his big mansion, and then they would blow up and then we would move back into a very small kind of tiny flat. So, I think from a young age, I was very obsessed with financial independence. I know I need to make my own money. But I really struggled with how to actually do that and I do remember when I was living in London, and in my early 20s, and I just had zero money and my flat-mate at the time, a really good friend of mine who we'd known since we were teenagers, he gave me something like 12 pounds in coins and I cried like and he was like, oh, my God is not a big deal. We've known each other forever. We're best friends and I just bawled my eyes out and I think that was a real moment to just going, I need to figure this out, why am I so resistant to money? Why am I repelling money almost? So, definitely, that was a moment that I remember just going I need to sort this out and that didn't mean that then suddenly it was like perfect. But I realized how much I needed to work on my inner, inner self.
Bonny Snowdon 27:50
Was there anything that prompted you to then to kind of look into sort of like the Law of Attraction or anything like that or was that something that you've always been interested in?
Denise Duffield Thomas 27:59
Well, the first time I learned about the Law of Attraction, I was 14, I used to hang out in a bookstore after school because I'd always forget my house keys. Because I had undiagnosed ADHD, that's a whole other thing. But I would go to stand in a bookstore and just read as many books as I could and I picked up this book called The Magic of Believing by Claude and Bristol and it's a book about the law of attraction. So, that kind of set me on a path. But again, I felt like the personal development world and the money world were completely separate and I was like, I can I can write goals and do affirmations and do all this stuff. But I still don't see how it can make me money, or help me in any way with money. So, it wasn't until really much later in my late 20s where I started to go, well, I've been reading about this stuff from Louise Hay about forgiveness work, what if I did this with my money? I've been reading about this stuff around affirmations and fake it till you make it? What if I kind of did this around money, and some incredible things started happening and so I wrote about this in my first book, Lucky Bitch, my first experiment was, I was in the UK on a student visa and I didn't have enough money for the second part of my tuition as an international student, and I was just like, everything's going to work out. Everything's going to work out, something's going to happen. I'm a lucky person and three days before my tuition was due the Friday afternoon, I got a bank error in my favour, £5000, which is what I needed, I think my tuition was £5400 and I just went, see, I knew it was all going to work out and I remember my then-boyfriend, now husband, he was like, what do you mean? I said I've been learning this thing about the Law of Attraction and one of it is just everything's working out for me My eye good all the time and he's like, that was really risky because he was like, what are you going to do? I was like, I don't know. It's all just going to work out and then I won, I think it was like $500 at Bingo and then do you know what, actually the life coaching thing is interesting because I was saying, I think I want to be a life coach, and someone messaged me and she said, you've just won this life coaching course and I was like, what do you mean? Because I was listening to this lady on a webinar and she was picking two people to win a life coaching scholarship, and you won one, and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember registering for that webinar. But I didn't even show up and she's like, well, you just want it and then I went to that lady's event and I was like, I think I want to write a book and the door prize was a self-publishing course, that this lady Sandy Foster had done. So, this lady Sandy was just like, oh, my God. So, you won my life coaching scholarship, you won this self-publishing course. It's so funny and then we were on our honeymoon and I was like, universe, I want more of this, I want to go travelling around the world for six months and when we got home, and I was telling my friends, a friend who text means that I found a competition to go travelling around the world for six months, all expenses paid and I was like, oh, there you go. So, that's what I wrote the first book about the law of attraction, how I used it, but here's the key. So, all of that, right, that's well over like hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of free things. I got to the end of that trip, and I went, still don't have any money and I went, Oh my God, I've been able to manifest all of this free stuff. But I still have blockages to receiving actual money. So, I was like, hey, universe, I'm a big girl now. Thank you for bringing all this amazing stuff to me, thank you for bringing me all these freebies that I've been asking for. But it was like a little kid kind of not being trusted with money and so I was like, I want to earn real money now. So, I then had to look at it from a different lens of like, why am I not allowed to make money? Why is money unsafe for me? That's then led to kind of the second book, which is called Get Rich Lucky Bitch, really looking at your mindset, issues around guilt and shame and all those things around money, not just getting free stuff and you know what, now I don't really win stuff anymore. I needed to at that point in my life. But it's not like I'm constantly winning things because I don't really apply for stuff anymore. Because I'm just like, I'll just buy stuff that I want. I don't have to get it given to me. I can just make money and buy what I want.
Bonny Snowdon 32:33
Amazing. One of the things that you touched on in your book quite a lot you to kind of talk about that it sounds amazing is your rose farm?
Denise Duffield Thomas 32:44
Yes. So, when I was pregnant with baby number three, and we knew her name, so her name is Parker Rose. We already knew her name. I started reading these country style. You guys, I think, you've got one called country living. There's one and it is always stories about these crazy people who were on a weekend getaway and they saw this rundown house and they found themselves and they bought it. I'd read it just going, who are these people? That's so weird. But I said to Mark, wouldn't it be fine if we had a country property as well and we were building this house we live in by the ocean and he was like, you can't have two houses and I was like, Well, why not? Let's just start dreaming about it. So, I started a Pinterest board, which is a great manifesting tip, by the way, start a Pinterest board start to see and because you start to believe it and then you start to go Oh, I wonder what I would like in my house and it just builds all that belief. You start to go Oh, I like this not that and then I said let's just go to open houses for fun and I still love doing this. This is my one of my favourite things to do is to go because I love poking around people's houses and we started looking at things and I'd go oh, I like this kitchen but not that kitchen. All of those things start to build your belief and I mean I did these years and years. I'd go to every open house in this area by the way where we live by the beach and I'd go, I like this and I don't like this and then of course I fell in love with the property and I ended up buying it but I didn't intend to buy a rose farm. I just wanted a little country cottage that we could use for the weekend. But I was painting rose cottages and the baby in my tummy her middle name was already Rose. So, it was obviously meant to be and it's not a huge commercial farm, it's a hobby rose farm that has like five rows of tunnels/ It's a really interesting lesson actually in terms of money because the first year we were going in cutting roses. So, are already the business was making multiple millions of dollars and my husband is the Launch Manager overseeing multiple million-dollar launches. But he was going to the farm cutting roses and selling them for $20 a bucket to the local florists. We had a Valentine's Day stall, the first year that we owned the farm, we made $1,300 and it was so much work. I was like, well. So, we were trying to figure out what's the best the best way to honour this space, but also be abundant, have an abundant mindset. So, we actually gave part of our land to a young couple to start a fruit and vegetable business in our garden and they take care of the roses now, too. So, it's a really big learning sometimes, though, that you might feel like you've nailed money mindset in one area of your life, but then something new will come up and it was like starting afresh of going, oh my god we have to monetize this. No, we actually don't but it's been such a great learning and I call them you know, million-dollar roses because the lessons that I learned from having a physical real farm are priceless.
Bonny Snowdon 36:11
Wow. What do you feel about when you're working for yourself, you're an entrepreneur, you're doing everything yourself, when did you get to the point where you felt, I can't do this on my own? I know you've got your husband and everything. But when did you get to the point where you're thinking, I need some help now with admin or whatever or did you try to do it all of yourself?
Denise Duffield Thomas 36:35
Of course, I tried to do it all myself. Yes, I did. Because my mindset lesson that I had to unlearn was I was called bossy as a little girl and I was called bossy in primary school, and I was called bossy in high school, I was called bossy at university when I was the president of my business club. So, I was really scarred from being called bossy and so I was like it's just easier for me to do it all myself. The thing that stressed me out the most in my first couple of years of business, was customer service, and emails, because people would email me questions all day long and I felt like I had to just respond to them, I didn't feel like I could say, hey, just booking a session with me or join my boot camp or buy one of my books. I felt like I'd help people, I'd say yes to everything. People would say, my links this doesn't work and I'd feel paralyzed to help them. So, my first hire in my business was someone to just read my emails for me and essentially be my assistant, five hours a week, that was my first thing and for the first couple of months, I wouldn't even trust her to respond, I would dictate the answer to her. We would get on Zoom or whatever and I'd say, okay, well, this is how you should answer this email, not as me. She wouldn't be pretending to be me, she would be my assistant, but I couldn't even trust her and then each meeting should go, well, 50 of these are already things we've discussed and I know how you'd want me to answer. So, it just got less and less work for me to go, this is how I'd answer because it's the same stuff, usually again, and again and then I think, I just upped the hours for my assistant. So, I got to a million dollars with me and one assistant and I say that sometimes from a badge of pride of going, yeah, look at my work ethic, and look at how much I can do myself. But I probably could have gotten there quicker if I had hidden some things out and so it's tricky sometimes when we go into business because we're told we'll outsource this and this, but it's so personal and what I find for some, especially if you're a mom, I actually think getting some laundry help might be a better use of extra money than hiring someone else in your business. Because you really have to look at what's stressing me out? What's stopping me from making money? What is impacting my sleep at night, and what's causing fights in my family? For some people, if I had to take everything down to the bones, I could do it. I can do everything in my business, if I want, I can create some graphics. They're not the best, but I can create graphics, I can do my own scheduling, I can do all these things. But if I had to do all of my own laundry, that would stress me out and drain me so much. But that's me. Everyone's got to look at their own to do list and I would even say it's harder for women to get permission to get help at home than it is to get permission to get help in their business. Which is still hard enough anyway.
Bonny Snowdon 39:31
Yeah, I know, definitely. I know when my husband left in 2017, first thing I did was get a cleaner. Because I haven't been allowed one before because that really stresses me out. I've got three children and I was working full time and everything and I was just like I could keep up with it. I don't really want to. Well, I do want to, I want to love the clean house, but I don't want to have to do it.
Denise Duffield Thomas 40:07
Exactly and I think we're at this point where it's like, there are so many opportunities to create assets for your family and we only have so many hours in the day. Isn't it better for you to create a piece of artwork that you can sell or also license and create passive income than to clean something that's just going to be dirty in a couple of hours' time, and that's the mindset shift? But there's so much guilt attached to that and I remember when Mark told his mom, who's English, that we had a cleaner and the first thing she said, Denise, I can teach you how to iron and I just was like, oh, my God and I think she gets it now. But it took years and years for her to understand why I couldn't just do all the cooking and do all the cleaning because that's what she grew up having to do. But also, it was a badge of honour to say I do all of these things to my family and I didn't feel like that was something that gave me anything, any sense of satisfaction or pride and I take it way too far now because I'm a very abundant now. I outsource everything. I don't do any cooking, any cleaning, I've got a daily housekeeper. All of those things, because I've never I've never been good at it. I've never seen it as a badge of honour. But then I hear people go, but I like cooking and I go, baby, keep cooking. No one's telling you to not cook. But are there other things or are there other things in your life that stress you out? And they go, well, yeah, I hate having to do x, y, z and oh, my god, I spoke to someone this week, who is multiple six-figure business, breadwinner of their family. She was cleaning the pool and she was like; I finally got a pool cleaner and I'm like, you're allowed to and it's creating a job for someone else. But there's absolutely so much cultural shame around that and gender shame around you have to do everything or you're a bad mother. And even people who don't have kids, there's still that sense of maybe you grew up in a working-class family and it's just like, who do you think you are having someone? You think you're too good to clean your toilet, or you think you're too good to do this and my first year when I had my first baby, my business was already at the million-dollar mark or close to. I think was about 750 to 900, something like that and I remember thinking, what are my friends from home going to think of me if I have a nanny? I was just mortified about it. But I then hired someone to come into my house, just be like a grandmother around to be like, okay, you've got a call for the next hour. Let me hold the baby and I'd go do the thing, come back and feed her and I just thought, I can't tell anyone about this. This is so shameful and now I don't care. Now. I'm just like, I channel, Don Ernest Thomas, who is my granddad, was my granddad, he's deceased. But I think he would come home and he'd be like, I get to choose what's on the TV. You guys bring food to me at 7:30 on the dot, clean clothes magically appeared. He never felt an ounce of guilt for any of that, because he was the breadwinner. So, I just channel his entitlement. I think sometimes.
Bonny Snowdon 43:44
I was brought up. So, I'm from a family, the six of us, six children are in my family and my mum and dad had a restaurant. So, we had Au Pairs, my dad is Swiss, and we had sort of foreign Au Pairs all the time growing up, felt very normal for us to have that. And they're all in the family photos and everything like that. So, I mean, for me, I would absolutely love to have a housekeeper and a chef. I need to be manifesting that so that I can have lovely food so I don't have to make it.
Denise Duffield Thomas 44:19
Incrementally, you can start small, you could have someone pre-do meals, because when I started getting a cleaner that was in my early 20s when I couldn't afford it and I did it once every two weeks just to do the bathrooms. Sometimes I think it's all or nothing and there could just be a way for you to incrementally work your way into that. But I have a question for you actually because I'm really curious sometimes about experiences you just said that your family had restaurants, did you say growing up and your dad was Swiss or was your as your mom Swiss too?
Bonny Snowdon 44:52
No, my mom's British.
Denise Duffield Thomas 44:53
All right. Okay, cool. So, I want to hear, is there anything around here because as soon as you said all my family had restaurants, the first thing came into my mind, if you've got time to lean you've got time to clean and I think growing up sometimes kids are in family businesses, sometimes they're not. I want to hear what money blocks do you think you got from that?
Bonny Snowdon 45:15
Well, we were either incredibly abundant or kind of just getting by, I think. I was very privileged as a child, we lived in the most beautiful building. I mean, it was called the old deanery. It was absolutely immense, huge and my dad would rock up one day with a boat, I bought a boat, let's go off and then speed around the thing. So absolutely brilliant and fantastic adventures. Well, they bought a motor cruise, and they took us to Greece, or we spent all of our summer holidays in Greece, sailing around the Greek islands. I mean, it wasn't like one of these amazing yachts and everything. It was fantastic. But it wasn't particularly luxurious and I guess as a child, really, it was like, well if we want something, we have it and what then happened, I guess when I left home and bought a house and everything like that, I took that money mindset with me. So, it's like, well, whatever I want, I'll just have, and then, of course, you get into debt and you can't afford stuff and it's like, well, I'll just get credit cards, then and then you end up with credit cards, and then you end up with debt, and then put that into the fact that you've also got a husband that you can't speak about finances to, and I ended up in this colossal amount of debt, I have no credit score, nothing, and I didn't know what to do and I couldn't speak to my husband about it, because he had gone absolutely mental and luckily, I ended up going to a charity in the UK to help with the debt management, which is all fine and that was a point, I get to the supermarket, I buy the family shopping, I'd stand there at the supermarket, I'd put my card in, and there'd be no money on it and that is the most horrible feeling in the whole world. It was my own fault but it was the most awful feeling. So, now, I'm making quite a lot of money each month, which I've worked really, really hard for and I've done exactly what you said, I've got little pockets of money and I call them things. Money loves me and I've got another Land Rover fund and all of that kind of stuff. But then I feel really awful when I have to spend it. So, I just want to keep and hoard all of this money because I just it there, and I don't have to spend it. I'm like, oh, God, I've got it. I don't begrudge spending it. But I get this little funny feeling and I'm like, oh, gosh, it's all going to go.
Denise Duffield Thomas 48:08
Yes, and I understand that. I think when you grow up in feast or famine, sometimes you can be very comfortable living in that space. And even what you said about the instant gratification thing, even though we didn't have a lot of money growing up, my mom was actually incredibly lucky. So, she would win bingo, or she would win something on the slot machine and so then, instead of going, okay, well, this could last us for a couple of months, she'd go and buy something outrageous and I remember she bought a motorbike one time, she didn't even ride it. So, sometimes it's not about the amount of money we have, it's the behaviour that will continue until we really look at it and so sometimes people think, well, a lottery win would say, solve all of my problems, or a big windfall would save all my problems, but it wouldn't. You're just the same person, and you'll continue it no matter how much money you have. So, it's looking at what can you learn from that experience, but also not to overcorrect, either and then sometimes people then become too frugal because of the fear of it. So, we're never going to be perfect with money. We're just aiming for how can we just create a bit more stability and not sabotage ourselves and to be mindful of those sabotaging behaviours too, because I can be very impulsive like that too and I have to watch that and I have to put things into place of going, okay, I'll talk to my financial advisor. I'll get someone to run the numbers because otherwise, I'm just very optimistic. I go, oh, I'll always work out. There's always more money. And it's really important to look at your patterns like that.
Bonny Snowdon 49:48
Yeah, definitely. Having joined your boot camp and I mean, I went through, of course, the first one, which I think it's the forgiveness bit. I just sat there crying because it brings so much out.
Denise Duffield Thomas 50:09
It is. Sometimes to these other layers of that of going, sometimes we have to forgive ourselves for past purchases and past behaviour and it is ongoing work forever. It really is. But it doesn't have to be scary and horrible. It can be very light and curious because I think we're curious people anyway. Think of the conversations we have sometimes with our friends very intimate details of our lives. But we don't have an outlet to be able to talk about these things that we've talked about today of just, how did we grow up and what did that teach us, and where are we overcompensating for those experiences, and where are we just unconsciously copying behaviour that we saw and what are we afraid of if we get a cleaner or all of those things? I just find it endlessly fascinating and fun to talk about. And that's why I've created my programs and written the books about it.
Bonny Snowdon 51:02
No, they are fantastic and I recommended your books to everybody, and I've implemented so many things as well from your book. So, now, I go to bed and I do my forgiveness. I love it. In your book, you talk about forgiving your toes. I love that. So, I love forgiving mine because I've got dodgy knees. So, I forgive my knees. You make everything so real and so normal and that's what I really love and it makes it so that it's attainable for me, you I class myself as a normal person, listening to somebody who's written this amazing book, and doing incredibly well and living the most fabulous life, and you're giving me stuff that I can do.
Denise Duffield Thomas 51:47
Well, makes me happy. That makes me happy. Because I think when I learned about the Law of Attraction to me, it seemed like this impossible task of just being a very good, perfect person and so I'm a Virgo, I'm very practical. So, I was like, but what does that mean? How can we put these things into real life? Because I'm not a good person. How can I think about myself as a good person all day long and so it's just really practical things that anyone can do right now? There are so many things in there of just going, you can upgrade something literally in your life, it's so symbolic that it will change your thoughts about yourself or release a little bit of friction. We're all smart people. I always think with business, especially making money, it's actually not hard. There's so much money out there. There's more money than anything else. But we are the ones who think that there's a lot of scarcity and we're the ones that sometimes are holding ourselves back too. No matter what's happening in the economy, you can always be in your own corner. That's the only thing we can control is, I deeply and completely love and accept myself and that creates miracles. It really does.
Bonny Snowdon 52:57
Yeah, amazing. Oh, well, I can't believe we've been chatting for an hour.
Denise Duffield Thomas 53:03
I know, Bonny and it's one o'clock for you now. Oh my gosh, I appreciate it and I got to see your cute little doggie at the start.
Bonny Snowdon 53:10
Yes, I've got three. Well, because you've got some sort of doodle, haven't you?
Denise Duffield Thomas 53:16
I've got two Cavoodles.
Bonny Snowdon 53:18
Okay, so I've got two, they call them, Newfypoos. So, the Newfoundland cross standard poodle, so they're big and I have a dear hound as well.
Denise Duffield Thomas 53:30
Newfypoos, they're the cutest thing I've ever had. Yes. I actually had a photoshoot with my family a couple of weeks ago and all of the kids were just being ratbags with family photos and you're like, smile little baby, I am going to murder you and they're just not into it. So, I said, well, I'm just going to get photos with my dogs and the dogs were just like, yes and so I've got 30 photos of me and the dogs. I'm like, well, I love these guys. They're my favourite kids.
Bonny Snowdon 54:04
I love my dogs. I love my dogs.
Denise Duffield Thomas 54:09
Babies bring abundance.
Bonny Snowdon 54:10
Yeh, definitely. Oh, gosh, it's been absolutely wonderful talking to Denice. Thank you so much for giving me your time and yes, I should go to bed. Very happy tonight having spoken to you.
Denise Duffield Thomas 54:22
Thank you so much and again, if anyone wants to preorder my new book, go to denisedt.com/prosper. Get all those pre-order bonuses. And I love hearing from people on social media as well. Tag both of us. My Insta is @denisedt. What's yours Bonny again?
Denise Duffield Thomas 54:25
Mine is @bonnysnowdonacademy.
Denise Duffield Thomas 54:42
Well, there you go. Tag us both, tell us your money story because again, it's so fascinating hearing those nuances of different industries or professions or backgrounds or sayings. I'm obsessed with people's family sayings around money and it can be easy a fun conversation and curiosity. We're allowed to make money.
Bonny Snowdon 55:02
Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much and it's so lovely to meet you.
Denise Duffield Thomas 55:06
Thank you.
Bonny Snowdon 55:08
Bye Denise.
Denise Duffield Thomas 55:09
Bye.
Bonny Snowdon 55:10
I really hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of my It's a Bonny Old Life podcast. If you did, I'd be so grateful to you for emailing me or texting a link to the show, or sharing it on social media with those you know who might like it too. My mission with this podcast is all about sharing mine and my communities experience and hope by telling your fascinating personal stories, championing the other amazing humans in my personal, professional and membership community, and to create another channel through which I can support you to realize your coloured pencil and life dreams. If you haven't done so yet. Please help me on my mission to spread positivity and joy throughout the coloured pencil world by following me on my socials at Bonny Snowdon Academy, or by getting on my list at bonnysnowdonacademy.com, and remember, I truly believe if I can live the life of my dreams doing what I love, then you can too. We just need to keep championing and supporting each other along the way in order to make it happen. Till next time
