Lisa Bilyeu
speaker
1,143 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 20 Dec
Lisa Bilyeu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
As that voice starts getting louder and louder, I ask myself, okay, is this gratitude that is making me feel better? Actually, it's the thing now that's holding me down. So when that voice gets louder, like, Lisa, you're not happy. That gratitude turns into, well, how ungratefully you... after year seven, after year eight. You want another life?
You want to go out and work when other women don't even have to work and you don't have to? How ungrateful are you? And what I realized was that gratitude piece was now actually keeping me stuck. It was creating the guilt and the shame for me to even want to speak up. So that's a big piece. I had to address the gratitude.
The second big, big piece that I don't think we talk about enough is the validation we get from people pleasing. It's easy to blame other people. I people please because I was brought up to do it. But the truth is, I feel good about people pleasing. Let's just take the extreme, Mother Teresa. She helped so many people. Are you telling me now Mother Teresa didn't get validation from helping people?
Of course she did. If she didn't get validation, she wouldn't have done it. So I go, okay, I'm getting validation from being the good Greek wife. I'm getting actual validation from being the woman that's willing to do the hard thing for her husband. And I'm scared to let go. And so what I call this in my book is the velvet handcuffs. It's going back to your comfortability of what you said before.
It's very comfortable to stay where you are. That's the velvet. That's the velvet around your wrist. It's like it's comfortable. It's soft. It feels familiar. But the handcuffs is the thing that keeps you there that allows you to never leave. So when I think about the reason why I didn't change and why I spent eight years, eight years, look at a human. Go from a baby to eight years old.
That's a long time. How on earth did I not speak up for eight years? It's because I was so afraid and I was so insecure about getting my validation from somewhere that I was afraid to let go of the one thing that I knew people were priding me on. And that was being a good Greek wife. So what I had to acknowledge in that moment is that the people pleasing was on me. It wasn't on anybody else.
And it was on me to find a different place of where I could get the validation from so I no longer sought it out from somewhere that actually made me unhappy. Once I then addressed that, I put an action plan in to take the leap and make a different change in my life.
I think I'm very goal oriented and I get out of my own way. And what I mean by that is if I feel insecure about something, if I'm an emotional about something, if that doesn't serve my goal, I just tell myself that I cannot use that to influence how I show up. So let's take a real world example. Quest has grown at 57,000%.
So that takes you from, in three years, you go to the second fastest growing company in North America. In five years, we go from zero to a billion dollar company. So that's how fast we were growing. Now, remember, I've just said that I was a stay-at-home wife for eight years. So I was a boss of two dogs. That was it. That was my experience. Two little chihuahuas.
So now we grow so rapidly, we start to build our manufacturing. And because I was the one that was shipping bars from my living room floor, I was just walking to the post office, mailing one box here and there. When you're grown at 57,000%, what that looks like is one day you're shipping from your living room floor, a couple of bars. And then within two years, I've got 10,000 square feet.
I've got 40 employees working just in my department alone. And half of those employees have criminal records. an ex-convict. Now we started our business in Compton and my husband used to work in the inner cities and big brother. And one of the things that we always said is we don't care where you come from. You may be have made mistakes in your past.
What we actually care about is who do you want to be? And are you willing to show up today and fight to be that person? That's what I care about. If you've robbed a car in your teenage years because you had bad guidance, that in and of itself shouldn't be punishment for the rest of your life. So Tom and I really did open up the doors to say, who wants to come in? Now, look, it's a beautiful idea.
But when it comes to reality, you have a five foot one British chick trying to command respect with some guys who are six foot five, ex-convicts with tats all around their neck and a teardrop on their cheek. Now, if no one knows what a teardrop on the cheek means, go just search it on Google. I would just leave it at that. It means that you have paid your dues in a very heinous way.
Now, when I say that, you can imagine the imposter syndrome. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. So here I am trying to take the leap from being a housewife to an entrepreneur, but I didn't know what I was doing. Now, there was a couple of elements here that I'd like to break down of how I just kept going.
Number one was back in the day, before we started Quest, fear was the thing that stopped me from taking action. I don't want my husband to judge me that I don't want to take care of his clothes or his food anymore, so I'm not going to speak out loud that I'm unhappy. That's fear preventing you from taking action. When we started Quest, we put our house up for collateral.
So if Quest doesn't work, my house goes away. So that fear that once upon a time would hold me back from taking action actually propelled me forward to take action. So every moment that I found myself not knowing what I was doing, I said to myself, Lisa, you have a choice. You can do what you used to do, which was run and hide, or you can save your house. Which one do you want?
And every time the fear of losing my house came into effect, I said, well, you better figure it out. So that became the motto I would use that you've got to better figure it out. Now, there's multiple ways to figure it out. The problem is if you just blindly listen to somebody, you're going to find yourself not succeeding.
Even if you're listening to this podcast right now, you'd be like, all right, Lisa said to do this. I did this and it didn't work. Well, I guess I'm no good. No, you have to find out the thing that actually works for you, which means you have to try a bunch of stuff. You may have to try 50 things to find that one thing that actually serves you and your goal. And I'm speaking from experience.
So I started trying to figure out how do I get these ex-convicts, these really big dudes, how do I command respect with them? So I went in reading all the books. I read the Sheryl Sandberg book, Lean In. I read all the leadership books. And I went in trying to be like Sheryl Sandberg. And I was like, all right, well, Sheryl said to do this. So this is what I'm going to do.
Didn't work at all, Ilana. What a surprise, right? You're dealing with different people in a corporate world with people that come from, let's say college, is very different than working in manufacturing and talking to a human that doesn't care about your degree. They just care about your interaction with them. So I tried a bunch of things, nothing worked.
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