Speakers: Maritess Bott and Nina
Maritess:
All right, well, thank you so much for listening to our podcast or watching our video—whichever way you’re hearing this. My name is Maritess, and I am the host of this podcast. We have a really special guest today. I’m very excited to introduce my friend to our clients and colleagues. Her name is Nina. She is a wonderful coach who lives in the UK, and we’ve been chatting for about a year now. It’s been so great to learn more about what she does. She’s been helping me tremendously.
Our topic is how to have a good mindset to build wealth. That’s the general topic, but I definitely want to start out with an introduction for Nina. I’d love to have you tell everyone your background and how you got started with your business.
Nina:
Sure. It’s great to be here, Maritess, and I’m really looking forward to chatting with you about how to build a mindset that embraces wealth.
A little bit about my background: I worked in corporate for a long time. When I had children, I set up my own business—a personal shopping business. I’ve been marketing and selling online since 2005. I had a good business; it was a nationwide business that I built up very quickly. I had a wonderful team who looked after the clients and did great work with them. However, I became aware that I wasn’t a confident entrepreneur. I really wanted to be confident, and one day that was brought home to me in a very dramatic way.
I had a big booking with a corporate accountancy firm. They booked me to do a pampering evening for their team—their senior female executives and their senior female clients. Off I went to host this evening on behalf of my company. It was in big, swanky offices—lovely buffet, champagne, canapés, all this lovely stuff going on. The senior female executives had booked themselves in for personal shopping consultations and makeup lessons. It was all really beautiful.
All the setup was done, and I thought, now I’m free. This is my opportunity to start talking to the senior execs and hopefully get another booking with them. As I started walking toward these two very smartly dressed women, a voice in my head said, “Don’t talk to them, because they’ll find out that you’re not good enough, that you’re not very good at what you do, that you’re flawed—and you don’t want them to know that about you. You have to keep that stuff hidden.”
So I did a quick sharp left turn and hid away for the rest of the evening. I found a row of dark offices, tried one of the doors that opened, went inside, and sat in the semi-darkness for the rest of the night. On the train home, I looked at my reflection in the window and thought, “You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep messing up opportunities. This will continue to happen until you sort it out.”
I remember making a commitment to myself that I was going to fix this somehow. I was going to find a way to start feeling confident—feeling sure about myself—and being able to talk to people in a way that made me feel that I was as good as them. That started me off, Maritess, on a long journey of personal discovery: personal development workshops, trainings, books—you name it, I did it. I needed to find something that gave me a permanent fix.
I spent a lot of money and time, and although these things worked for me at the beginning, after a while the good effect would wear off. It was just a temporary fix. I wanted a permanent one. One day, an email led me to a guy who said, “The only reason you don’t feel confident about yourself is because you believe these limiting beliefs are true about you.” I thought, okay, I’ll try anything to get this fixed.
I signed up with him, and we began coaching. After a while, I realized that I was behaving differently. For example, I wanted to shoot some videos for my business, but I’d always thought, “No one’s going to watch me, no one’s going to be interested. Other people say this much better than I do. What’s the point? It’s scary to put myself out there.”
Then I remember one day thinking, I’m just going to make a very quick video—and there was no voice in my head saying, “No, don’t do that.” I thought, that’s really interesting. I realized that I had dissolved enough of my limiting beliefs to allow myself to start making different decisions. I brought in fresh thinking, and it felt expansive, good, safe, and liberating.
I realized that if I can do this, anyone can. That’s when I started working with entrepreneurs, because I realized that many of them resisted taking action in their business. They were scared to show up, scared to play big, and because of that, they were limiting their income and the type of clients they could work with.
And this could be fixed. That’s what led me down the path of working with clients. I love working with financial advisors, lawyers—anyone who feels they’re holding themselves back. It’s not the strategy, it’s not their team, it’s not their clients. They’re doing it to themselves. The only way they can change that is by working on themselves. When they reach that realization and awareness, that’s the perfect time to start working with them, because they’re absolutely committed to bringing in fresh thinking, examining their old beliefs that limited them, and asking, “What can I do now to expand my business? What can I do to create new habits that will not only grow my business but also give me a better work-life balance?”
Maritess:
Absolutely. I resonate so much with everything you just said, because I think—I know you work with men and women—but I think women in general go into our professional lives feeling less than. I mean, it just feels that way when I’m a lowly associate in a brand-new law firm, for me that has all these men who are much older than me, and I totally get that feeling of, “Oh, I’m not big enough, I’m not good enough.” I just remember thinking, if I knew what I know now, in that body at 25 years old, I would have been much farther ahead than I am today. But regardless, you need that journey—just like you needed your journey—to get to the place you are now.
Nina:
Exactly. That reminds me of a client—a financial advisor, a brilliant woman at what she did. She took great care of her clients. She told me she used to go to meetings and sit in a room full of men, and she would never speak up because she thought, “I don’t know as much as them. They’re not going to be interested in anything I have to say. I have to stay small, keep quiet, and just learn while I’m here. I can’t contribute in any way.”
I thought that was such a shame, because this wasn’t coming from the men in the room. It was coming from her own thinking—the meanings she was making up about herself, how she was putting these limits on herself. That meant the guys didn’t notice her in the room, even though she had so much to contribute. Once we worked together to identify and dissolve those limiting beliefs, she started showing up in a much more powerful, more confident way.
Maritess:
Absolutely. That’s exactly my own experience working with you. It took a while, and I’m certainly not 100%, but each time it gets better. I catch myself hitting that limiting belief in a room, and I think, “Nope, that’s just your imagination. It’s really just a neutral thing.” And I remember your voice, reminding me that I’m worthy of this interaction with these people.
So I appreciate what you were saying. One of our first conversations, I remember the phrase you gave me—it’s an inside job. And it really is. It’s so true for everything anyone does. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, because we are very agnostic about industry. If you have the right mindset, the sky’s the limit for whatever you’re trying to achieve.
So tell us a little bit about how you work with clients. How do we start, and what’s the mindset? How do you start to change the mindset?
Nina:
Working with clients—each one is a unique person. What’s fascinating is that no two people on this earth view the world in exactly the same way. We all have our own unique way of looking at the world, because we’re seeing it through our own thoughts and belief systems. Some of our beliefs are really positive and productive, but others are negative and unproductive. You have a unique view of the world, and the way you see it is different from how I see it. Isn’t that fascinating?
Every single client I work with receives completely customized work, based on their challenges and goals. I’ve found over the years that, whether I’m working with financial advisors, lawyers, or other entrepreneurs, the challenges tend to fall into the same buckets.
The main challenges that stop entrepreneurs from having all the success they want are blocks around money—how much they can charge, how much money they can have, and what is possible for them. Then there are blocks around marketing themselves. There’s a real fear for many entrepreneurs about putting themselves out there and telling people what they stand for, what they offer, and what their services are. They think people will criticize them, won’t be interested, or that the competition is better.
But we know that if you don’t market, no one’s going to know what you do, and they’ll find someone else to work with. Marketing is obviously a crucial part. Then there are fears around sales conversations. No one wants to feel salesy or sleazy or like they’re persuading someone. There’s a lot of fear around asking for the sale and stating a fee. This means you don’t have conversations—and we know that the more conversations you have, the more clients you’ll have. It’s actually a very simple formula. Marketing is the shortest route to a conversation with a prospect.
I also come across a lot of avoidance behavior—avoiding marketing, outreach, follow-up, and taking action that would help you get more clients and in front of more people. All this avoidance behavior is like burying your head in the sand and hoping everything will go away. It doesn’t work like that. It just means you’re not taking action and not making progress in your business, which leads to feeling stuck.
I worked with one financial advisor who said to me, “I feel like I’m 30 years behind where I want to be.” That’s a horrible feeling. He felt stuck for 30 years in his business. He knew he could be taking bigger action—opening another office, hiring another team member—but he was so scared of doing those things. He said, “It’s going to cost me money, and what if it doesn’t work out?” He was paralyzed by fear.
This type of thinking has to be assessed and changed, because otherwise things won’t move forward. At the end of our lives, we look back and have regrets. There’s overwhelm, lack of focus, procrastination—all of which come from fear-based thinking. These are the main challenges I work on with entrepreneurs.
Once you start changing behavior in these areas and building more productive habits, what happens is the entrepreneur becomes consistent. They start creating consistent habits, which lead to taking action, having more conversations, and therefore, getting more sales. Consistency is the heart of any business.
Delegating the work that strangles your time so you can focus on high-level tasks is key. It seems so clear and obvious—logical, even. You could have the best marketing strategy in the world, but if you don’t have the mindset that allows you to pursue it daily, that strategy is absolutely worthless.
It’s about getting clients into action—but in a way that expands their thinking. They’re thinking big, playing big, and willing to take risks, but in a way that feels free and expansive to them. Because we know that not everything we do is going to work.
Right. It’s not that that’s the issue. The issue is your response. What’s your response when you try something and it doesn’t work the way you wanted it to? Do you go and lick your wounds and disappear for a few weeks, or do you think, “Okay, that was interesting. I’ll take the learnings from that and move on”?
The most successful people are not scared of taking risks. They’re not scared of taking action. They know some of what they try isn’t going to work, but what they want to do is find the things that do work, do them consistently, and keep building their business that way.
Maritess:
Absolutely. All of that is so true, because we just have these little roadblocks as entrepreneurs. We’re trying to do the day-to-day—pay bills, pay payroll—and yet we know, “I should really be pivoting this way to build my business differently.”
What I’ve found helpful, and what I’ve heard from you and others, is knowing your “why.” Why are you doing what you’re doing? And also, what is that thing in the future you’re truly trying to achieve? It gives me a sense of direction—like, okay, that’s my roadmap, that’s my destination. Whatever the ins and outs of the path are—the little downturns, failures, whatever you want to call them—they don’t feel as bad, because I know I’m heading in that direction. So tell us, what do you think about the connection to that “why”?
Nina:
The “why” is so important, and so many people don’t have one. They plunge into a business because they enjoy delivering their service, and then suddenly they realize they have to become an expert marketer, an expert salesperson, a tech expert, and a team builder. They become overwhelmed with everything.
That’s why the “why” is so important—it gets you through those times when everything feels like it’s coming at you and you’ve got a million things to do. Once you can find your “why,” everything becomes much clearer, simpler, and easier. When we work together, we keep your goals right at the top. This motivates us to serve at the highest level.
There are many reasons why people go into business. It might be to provide a wonderful lifestyle for their family, to serve at the highest level, or to transform people’s lives. It could be a combination of those things. But often people forget that part and get stuck in the nitty-gritty of everyday tasks, which becomes really tiring.
I encourage everyone listening—whether in business or not—to find out what’s truly important to them. What matters most? Is it family, health, or building a particular lifestyle? And go beyond that. If you could go all the way down that road, what do you really and truly want?
When I ask my clients this, they often say things like, “I want the freedom of choice. I want the freedom to do what I want, when I want. I want to travel. I want to take my family on amazing holidays. I want to invest in incredible self-care.” So I encourage everyone to go beyond surface goals and really think about what makes your heart sing.
It doesn’t have to cost money. It can simply be having time to yourself every day, or creating a wonderful mindset practice that helps you connect with who you really are. Self-care and taking that time for yourself are crucial—and we often skip them because we think we’re too busy or we’ll do it tomorrow. We make New Year’s resolutions, but don’t wait for January. Self-care is the most important thing you can do.
That’s why I love personal development. The most important thing to me is finding moments of peace—moments of complete clarity—when a wonderful, liberating thought pops into my mind without me having to search for it. Those moments of quiet between words, when you’re fully present, are so precious.
So take some time, if you haven’t already, to think about what’s really important to you. What do you stand for?
Maritess:
I’m going to tack onto that, because of what I do. We talk about legacy—what you’re going to leave behind. I’m a big proponent of this, and maybe it’s too “rah-rah” for some people, but for me, I’m always asking: What do you want your kids to feel about what you’ve established for yourself and what they’re inheriting?
Money is money, but you also want to pass on your values. Or maybe your legacy is, “I’ve helped people through my business.” For me, that sense of having helped families to the highest degree brings lasting contentment. Whatever it is, I feel like it should be about more than just our lifetime.
Nina:
Legacy is such a wonderful word, and it means something different to everyone. Like you, I have children, and I want to support them financially—to help them buy their first property. That’s a big “why” for me. It’s not my biggest “why,” but it’s an important one.
And for that, I know I need someone like you—to help me plan and make sure all of that is in place. It’s peace of mind. That’s what it really is—leaving a legacy and taking steps now to secure it. We can’t control everything, obviously, but we can control our intentional thinking.
If you want to create a legacy for your family—whether financial, emotional, or values-based—you have to commit to making it happen, because it won’t happen on its own. This is what I find so exciting: moving away from default, conditioned thinking that takes us down negative rabbit holes, and instead asking, “What do I want to create in my life?” Spend time on that. It’s really important.
Otherwise, you can become directionless in life—living the life your parents wanted or that your teacher suggested for you. Live the life you want. But it always starts with assessing where you are and asking, “What do I really want? What do I want for myself? What do I want for my family?”
It’s so important, because you can take action on it right now.
Maritess:
Right. And don’t wait—like your client did—for 30 years and then think life passed you by and I’m not where I want to be, right? It’s so sad because we can do something about it now.
Nina:
Absolutely. That’s one of the takeaways I’ve learned from you — the “now.” It’s really a decision in your head to say, “I want this. I want this now.” And in my head, I’m just going to believe that it’s already here, or that it’ll be here eventually. Because you can at least live in that present time but know you’re working toward whatever legacy you’re trying to build — and take action on it now. Take whatever action you can. You can take the first step now to start working to make sure you secure that.
Maritess:
Absolutely. Well, what do you suggest for an entrepreneur who might be listening today to maybe have — what would be the first step if they did want to work on their mindset, kind of get reset, and have this conversation with you? What do you think is the first step and some of the tools that might be good for them to start with?
Nina:
The best way of doing this, I’ve found, is to take a big bird’s-eye view of your business. And this is something that I love doing with you. By doing that, you start seeing, “Okay, these are all the areas of my business — there’s productivity, there’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s business essentials. What am I doing well, and what aren’t I doing well? Where do I need to put my focus?” Because we can spend time focusing on the wrong areas in our business.
So, I’ve created two scorecards — one is for financial advisors, and one is for people who aren’t financial advisors. What they do is highlight the areas of your business that need your attention so you can grow your profit as quickly as possible. I would encourage anyone who wants to start looking at where their mindset is stuck to take these. One is called a scorecard, and one is called a profile. See where you are right now.
Then, if they want to take the next step and book a call with me — where we deep dive into their business, look at what’s working, what isn’t working, and put together a roadmap to help them get to their goals — then I would love to speak to anyone. But the first step is to do some exploring. The scorecard and the profile — one for financial advisors, one for non-financial advisors — both give you lots of insights about your mindset, which you may not be aware of.
And this is the really juicy part because once you know where you need to start building, it becomes very easy for you to take the next step.
Maritess:
I like that. I think we all need to do that checkup, tune-up, whatever — for all of our business processes as well as our mindset. I think that is a great first step. And I do remember our first conversation — I learned so much just in that one conversation with you. So, I know whoever wants to take advantage of that, just get the information so that you know what direction to go.
Nina:
Thank you. Wonderful. Well, any final thoughts you might have?
Maritess:
Final thoughts: if you become aware that you have negative thinking going on, just stop and ask yourself, “Is this 100% true about me?” You’ll always get the answer, “No, it’s not 100% true about me.” This will help you start disrupting that negative thinking, and the more you can disrupt it, the easier your mind will settle. You’ll become clear and start having those moments of clarity again. It’s awareness — just become aware when that starts happening for you so you can disrupt it as quickly as you can.
Nina: I love, love, love that because it’s prevented me from stewing on many occasions, just in the last year. You can sit and keep repeating in your head and dwell on all those negative things — so that’s just great advice.
Maritess:
Well, thank you so much, Nina. I really appreciate your time today and loved our conversation. I learned more about you, and I loved it. I didn’t know that you owned that business before, so that was cool to know. Glad to have you on our podcast. Maybe one day we’ll do it again.
Anybody who has any questions, certainly they can reach out to Nina — there’s some information on the link. Otherwise, you can call me and ask me about it as well. Thank you, everyone, for joining us and being part of our podcast, and hope you have a wonderful day
