Produced & Edited by - Morgan Brown
Interviewers - Carrie Kwan and Lucy Kippist
Guest - Lisa Corduff
Loved this episode of Mumbition The Podcast? Find out more from our special guest.
Shift & Change
00:00:43:03 - 00:01:03:19
Carrie Kwan
For almost a decade, Lisa Cordruff has been helping other women create lifestyle habits that support their overall wellbeing and get them unstuck. She joins us on Mumbition the podcast to share some of her considerable insights into how she has been building a business that supports others with humor and grace. Welcome, Lisa.
00:01:04:17 - 00:01:06:18
Lisa Corduff
Thank you so much for having me.
00:01:07:24 - 00:01:25:04
Carrie or Lucy
We are really excited to dive a bit deeper into your journey so far, I think we'll have lots of nuggets to share today. We're really passionate about educating women on pitching with confidence, I'd love to hear and share your pitch with our listeners.
00:01:26:13 - 00:02:42:11
Lisa Corduff
It's so funny because I run away from elevator pitches. I have been in business now for almost a decade and there's been so many different things that I've done.
But if right now I was to have an elevator pitch, it would be to say that I'm the founder of the Change Room and I'm an expert in practical behavior change strategies for women who are feeling that stuck feeling or feeling overwhelmed in their daily life. I help them through a very specific behavior change program, upgrade their lifestyle, their mindset, their careers, so, I love what I do. I feel like I have over the years been perfecting what I do through creating a lot and in many different areas.
So there's an elevator pitch from the person who doesn't use elevator pitches because I don't like feeling boxed into doing one thing in particular. I'm a podcaster. I'm a solo mom of three. I'm a speaker. I write, you know. But anyway!
00:02:44:00 - 00:04:03:12
Carrie Kwan
I sometimes think that it's a very unnatural thing to get people to talk in under 30 seconds, but sometimes it's the only opportunity you have to make that first impression, right? It is really unnatural for people like us who love chatting, conversing and connecting with people because it's like, Oh, do I only have 30 seconds?I need more time to understand and to help and to connect. But that's what we have to do sometimes, we just only have that little grab.
I love that you seem like a bit of a magic wand, I think sometimes, that feeling of being stuck and whether it's in ambition, livelihood, wellbeing and gosh, you can feel stuck in all those aspects sometimes! It seems like you've been on a journey so far, too, but I'm kind of wondering, what have you actually had to stop doing over the last few years to build the business that you've created today?
00:04:03:23 - 00:10:10:05
Lisa Corduff
Well, it's actually really interesting. My business this year, I basically shut it down. So in 2014, I launched my very first online course and it was called Small Steps to Wholefoods. I launched that with a baby, a two year old and a three year old. Because I'd been blogging and I realised that once my baby turned one, I'd probably have to go to work if I didn't monetise this food blog that I was working on.
I'd been showing up on socials for two years. I created a little 21 day Wholefoods challenge, and on the back of that, I launched Small Steps to Whole Foods. It was run completely via Vimeo and MailChimp. There was no course platform, nothing like that. I had over 500 people sign up to that program and I made 35 grand. I can remember I'm just thinking, I think this is a thing, you know, I think I've got something here.
Ever since then, I was running on adrenaline, and I was caught up in the amazingness of this world where I could learn something from experts. My whole thing has been like pulling in what these other clever people know and putting it in that in a teachable format that gives you results.
What I saw in the online world, in the food world, was this is the way and if you're not doing, you know, cutting sugar or paleo or this or that or the other, then you're basically failing at health and life. I just knew that there was a completely different way for women to create the changes that they wanted to create and it involved taking small steps; just basically my whole philosophy of life.
But it was so amazing to be able to put all this together and create a business off the back of it and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah! I was in that stage of life as a mummy, days were just like go, go, go, go, go, go, go. It was exciting, new and fresh and I felt super activated.
Then I had some very big things happen in my life. My husband was really unwell, he actually passed away in 2019. We went into the lockdown years here in Melbourne. I have three children, they were nine, seven and five when their dad died right before, September 2019, then lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 and here I was holding this business together and just thinking, “oh my God, I have to figure out how to make this work.”
But I wasn't okay, I just kept up that adrenaline. I see so many mums working from that place and I realised it wasn't sustainable for me. What happened this year in 2022 and what I've had to let go of, because what happened was the kids went back to school, lockdowns were over, we could socialise, we could be out and about and I felt flat for the first time. I couldn't activate the part of me that needed to rise to the occasion because I'd been rising for so long, I'd been holding it together for so long and I let it go.
I looked at my business, I looked at whether it actually worked in the context of the life I was living now at the ages my children were at now in a solo parenting capacity and I knew it wasn't right anymore. I started noticing big changes in the online space, and I knew that the way we needed to deliver programs was changing.
There was a huge need to change delivery of online programs. Gone were the days where people would be happy to sit down and watch an hour of training in a lot of respects; overwhelmed mums are the women whom I serve and they didn't want to consume in that way anymore.
We just had the pandemic and I couldn't do it, I wasn't activated by my own business. So what I let go of was basically all of my offerings, slowly, slowly, slowly. Over time, I have run high level masterminds for business women, I've run low level memberships, I've run courses for either four or eight weeks, I've done three month coaching programs, I've had a higher ticket coaching, ongoing coaching program and what actually was happening was I was shutting it all down. I needed to do that to create space for what was coming next, I needed to hear myself again, I needed to recalibrate my nervous system, our family unit, and I needed to recover after what was a messed up few years.
That's a very long winded answer of saying, my very, very best work has been created this year. I gave myself a blank slate to create from an honest, current state of where I'm at right now and where I feel like my community is at right now. I am filled with possibility, potential and all the good vibes for 2023. But in 2022, I would say that was my hardest year in business because I had to allow myself to let go.
00:10:11:14 - 00:11:12:20
Carrie Kwan
Well, thanks for sharing your journey there, Lisa. There's so many elements that I'm hearing you gave yourself. I think acknowledging that it's been a really tough couple of years as well and you've gone through some really, really challenging times and there's that permission to actually pause and kind of assess and sort of take stock on where you really want to be formulating your energy, looking at from perhaps what consumer trends, like how people have actually consumed online content has gone through a bit of a ringer.
Everyone had to go online, everyone had to get comfortable with Zoom very fast and everyone was consuming huge amounts of educational content during the pandemic years.
00:11:13:19 - 00:14:40:00
Lisa Corduff
I mean, honestly it was like watching a tidal wave of people enter the space. What I very quickly realised was, I mean, I used to have dialed in conversion rates off webinars. I'm good at webinars, I've practiced it. I used to have to explain to people back in 2015, you're going to get a link and you're going to click on that link at 8:00 and I will appear as if on TV on your screen live. We had to educate people what Zoom was or back then I think I was using Webinar Gem.
What happened over the last few years was there were a lot of practitioners and people who were used to doing stuff in in-person who created online courses and I think it's an amazing thing. But there's a new challenge now for course creators, and that is to help people who want the transformation that you're offering believe that they are actually going to get a result.
Because I don't think a lot of the people who came online to teach actually understood how to teach, how to move people through a learning program online, it's a whole skill set. The changes that I made early in the year, I was like, okay, let's really look at this and see what's going on and I know what my community needs and desires. How could I deliver that to them in a way that gets them a result in 2022?
Everything I know about behavior change and I created this program called 30 Days, 30 Ways to Make Life Easy, and it's purely an audio program. Of course, we have transcripts for the hearing impaired, and we use audio as our platform for delivery.
Every day over 30 days, they get a short sort of five minute max audio with one idea. But this repetitive tone of what's possible that we should that we can make life easy, like all the things that I know actually help people get a result, which is changing how they think, is delivered to them in these bite-sized chunks.
Now, I have never had completion rates like I had completion rates from that program, so we created another one. Then, as I was giving myself space to figure out what was coming through for me, I realised this was going to be a part of the next phase of online program delivery for my business because my community loves it. So the change, the three month experience and every second day, they get an audio short.
I cannot even tell you the results from this program because we took the time and I really looked around and I really thought about what would help them get results in the current state of the world, and it has been a game changer. There are also video elements, there's workbooks, there's all sorts of things. There is a course platform, but these audio, it really has changed the results that I can help women with.
I do think that if you're still delivering programs in the same old ways, people are just going to look right past you, they don't believe you. I think people had some very dodgy online course experiences, they didn't get results from them and now there's this new objection that we have to help people cover.
00:14:47:00 - 00:15:05:00
Lucy Kippist
So much there to unpack, Lisa. I love the audio idea and what I was thinking as I was listening to the speech is that it's that cut throat, isn't it? If we've all had a bit of video fatigue, Zoom fatigue, audio is something that we're not used to as much, so we're immediately a bit curious and we can do other stuff while we’re listening.
00:15:11:00 - 00:17:22:00
Lisa Corduff
Well, I mean, it does depend on your own if you're having to deliver training where you need slides, you need to pull bits in, there’s diagrams, it absolutely still has its place. I'm talking about my community in particular and also what I know about what our brains need in order to actually have a change is repetition. Repetition, repetition, same things over and over again and suddenly you're creating new pathways and by the end you are thinking about what just happened.
So for me to deliver my people what they desire, it is a game changing way to do it, but it won't suit every business, obviously. I think while you say it's different, it is, but it's not, because I think that a lot of us are listening to podcasts and audiobooks. We know what it's like to listen while we're doing dinner, after we've dropped the kids off. It's actually become a part of what we do. In fact, we need to make it easier for people to consume the content in our marketing and in programs in order to succeed right now, because there's so much noise. I mean, there just undeniably is so much. I did a survey on women in October and almost 1500 women responded to the survey and the result that I got from it will make you weep. I mean, 1.2% of women who answered that survey felt fully rested. So like, what the hell? Everyone's tired, everyone's depleted, women are feeling like they are unsupported in their life. They've got so much going on and yet, they’re women who also desire stuff and want stuff. I had women, the majority, 69.7% or something, claim to have less than 3 hours a week of me time.
00:17:27:00 - 00:18:08:00
Carrie Kwan
So it's shocking, isn't it? Actually I was going to ask you about that because what you've described is a business overhaul, but also the personal transformation challenges that you've faced.
I’ve seen you on socials throughout that time, throughout the past four years. I love what you do on there and I'm always awed by how much energy you give. I was thinking, how do you get that kind of resilience? What's the secret? Is there a secret to going through that amount of personal change, that amount of business change? Is it your ability to be honest about that on socials? Because you're very honest. You're telling everyone what you're doing and what you're thinking. Does that help?
00:18:11:00 - 00:22:34:03
Lisa Corduff
Oh, yeah, I am, but it's always for my business. I built my business in a time where you could have genuine community and conversation on social media, it was the glory years. I didn't need Facebook ads for the longest time. I have a background in journalism, so every time I post anything, I'm always thinking, well, it's a story. Why would anyone care? Even if it's something about my life, it's actually for my community.
It's for a point of connection, it's to have them feel something, it's to develop trust, it's to teach, it's to expose a truth or a belief that they might ask themselves that's maybe not true, it's moving them towards a sale. So, yes, I show up and I'm honest on social media because, I don't know if you can swear on this podcast, but I don't like seeing the fake bullshit, I don't like it. I don't subscribe to that kind of stuff. A lot of what I see business women doing on there, I'm so bored, it is just so vanilla. Can we just be real humans? I've always tried to be a real human, but it's always for my business.
I show up because I've got three kids to take care of. I had to find a way and I could disappear. But I also feel like as consumers of content online, I personally know people who inflate results that they get for clients or where their business is at and all that sort of stuff in their marketing. I just feel sick about it because I don't think women are served by all the smoke and mirrors that are going on out there.
I think we're actually served through genuine connection and genuine people, and we should be asking more questions of the people we're buying products from online. I have always come from the point of view that if someone back in the Wholefoods days, if someone was to meet me in a park and they saw me with my three children, and this happened often, they'd be like, Oh, that's Lisa Corduff, that sort of what I would expect to see from Lisa Corduff. I'm not going to put up this pretense of perfection or like I've got all the frequencies because I don't.
Same goes with the mindset stuff, same stuff goes with the business, I just ran a program and I shared honestly about what has been going on behind the scenes in my business, what I've got planned for next year, some lessons that I've learned. The women were just like, Oh my God, thank you for being honest. What's going on out there if people aren't being honest about the changes that are happening and the fact that if your personal life is struggling, of course that's going to impact your business and you're going to need to think differently about your resources and the energy that you have. Sorry, I'm a bit ranty, I just realised that.
00:22:34:14 - 00:23:07:24
Carrie Kwan
I think you've got that same fat passion and fire in your belly. We often say that business doesn't suit business owning mums and there's so many facets of that, whether it be structural, cultural or societal contributions to that, so we're glad to have you alongside us, changing that lexicon and that language and making it suit us. Sometimes you have to show your whole self at work.
00:23:07:24 - 00:23:40:11
Lisa Corduff
How can we not? We are our whole selves. I don't understand the separation between work and a different life. Who was saying that same sort of thing recently? She did a post about work partnerships, it's like you think you're not bringing your whole self to work, but yeah, you are and it's going to bring up all your stuff, which I think is totally true.
00:23:42:00 - 00:24:32:22
Carrie Kwan
There’s definitely been a shift and I think we still need to own that dialogue with ourselves and with other people. I wanted to take us a little bit in a different direction, Lisa, there's a lot of aspects that I've seen and heard you talk about so far, and I often think in a different way when I run a business.
When you were talking about changing your product and stopping things, we’re a digital platform, so in a product sense we actually call that sunsetting features, like if it's not working and people aren't using it, we sunset it, we stop it and we create something new. How would you describe your relationship to risk when it comes to a business? What are some of the processes that you put in place to protect yourself?
00:24:32:22 - 00:26:23:00
Lisa Corduff
I am the biggest risk to my business because I change my mind, I'm a bit flighty. If I am feeling activated about what I'm doing, there is no stopping. As soon as that starts to disappear, I struggle, if I have to fit into a box, I struggle. So my favorite thing in business is creating, I like creating and Lucy asked about showing up, it's almost like a performance, I like showing my face. I mean, I was a journalist, I had a TV show, that's what I like. If I can be in my little zone of genius, then everything's good. I have created and shut down a lot over the years. I often think if I'd been someone who could just stick with one thing, that Small Steps Living brand could have been massive.
I work with people. I manage the risk by working with smart people who can keep me on track. I manage the risk by reminding myself around my desk and around my room what I'm working on and why, so that I can actually, especially with The Change Room, which was launched this year, and we've got so many ideas to build out.
The biggest risk is my boredom arriving and feeling like I'm just going to go,it's that whole bright, shiny object syndrome. I'm grateful that I've arrived at a level of maturity and business maturity where I can recognize the risk of that and build in excitement, new creative endeavors that don't take the business off track from its goals.Does that make sense? I don't know if I've explained that properly.
00:26:26:00 - 00:27:03:00
Lucy Kippist
100%. So, your risk process is to employ people who support your vision and keep you risk free, I love it! We have one last question and it is in relation to a shape and I think you're going to be good at this question.
At Mums & Co we talk about harmony, that's our vision for women. That you can have your ambition, your livelihood, and you will be as a shape, any shape you want to achieve harmony. So if you are reflecting on the perfect life for you, what shape would that be?
00:27:05:00 - 00:29:15:00
Lisa Corduff
Oh, that is a good question, and you think that I'm going to be good at that? I mean, I'm sort of a circle, but I don't really think it's that either. I don't know if it's a shape, maybe it's more colour. Can I go off script and be a colour? My favorite state of being is peace, which is sort of like harmony, and I can feel when we've gone off track with things, I can feel when I'm not feeling peaceful, harmonious inside.
The color blue is a big favourite of mine because I associate it with feelings of peace, a connection to water, nature, all of those sorts of things. When I talked before about the adrenalin working from that space and having to let that go, it does not work in my life.
My kids need a really regulated, peaceful mum, a calm mum, that's actually my main job, that is my job. My business needs a peaceful Lisa, but also activated Lisa, inspired Lisa. But trying not to move into that creates drama, stress, adrenaline for myself because that feels very creative, that space to me. I used to think I needed chaos in order to be creative, and I actually don't, that's total shit.
I'm actually realising that the more I maintain that state of peacefulness, I guess your word harmony, which feels blue to me. Everything feels rock and roll, and it's like the springboard to all the good things that I want in my life.
00:29:18:00 - 00:30:53:15
Lucy Kippist
Beautiful answer. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on Mumbition today. If you'd like to hear more about Lisa and The Changing Room program, you can find her on Instagram @lisacorduff
We really hope today's story has inspired you and we’d love to help support your own business journey in 2023. Mums & Co helps women in business grow, and we have three tiers of membership to provide strategic advice, access to deep networks and opportunities to be more visible. So if you've got more information, head over to mumsandco.com.au for more details or book a one-to-one call with me today.
What is your favorite song to dance to?
00:30:53:22 - 00:31:15:12
Lisa
Well, my favorite song is Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac. I mean, Stevie Nicks is my spirit animal. So, yeah, it would always be pumping up Go Your Own Way. But you know what else? Really, like, Tiny Dancer really gets me going, let's be honest. I did also see Billy Joel last week, I am a huge hardcore Billy Joel fan. Yeah. I mean, I could talk about music all day.
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