Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Lisa Bilyeu: Radical Confidence, My Journey From Housewife to Billion-Dollar Boss | E55
Thu, 21 Nov 2024
In a world that imposes expectations, Lisa Bilyeu is all about defying them. Raised in a traditional Greek Orthodox family, her path was set: get married and raise a family. But after eight years as a stay-at-home wife, she could no longer ignore the inner voice telling her she was meant for more. So, she co-founded Quest Nutrition with her husband and built a billion-dollar business. In this episode, Lisa talks to Ilana about setting ambitious goals, trusting your decisions, and finding self-worth without needing external validation. Lisa Bilyeu is a renowned entrepreneur, bestselling author, and co-founder of Quest Nutrition, a multi-billion-dollar company. Her mission is to use content creation to empower women to break free from limiting beliefs and unlock their full potential. In this episode, Ilana and Lisa will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:56) The Drip Effect: How Beliefs Shape Us (04:54) Breaking Free from the “Velvet Handcuffs” (06:26) The Trap of People-Pleasing and Toxic Gratitude (09:08) Learning Leadership Through Trial, Error, and Rap Music (10:00) From Housewife to Entrepreneur (17:30) Handling Your Emotions in Business (24:30) How Lisa Tackles Online Hate with Grace (31:40) Crafting a Clear Mission Using the “Who, What, Why” Method (37:30) Lisa’s No-BS Guide to Success (40:03) The Importance of Practice (44:45) Why I Chose My Mission Over Motherhood (01:01:23) The Tough Moment That Empowered Her (01:06:49) The Reality of Happiness Lisa Bilyeu is a renowned entrepreneur, best-selling author, and co-founder of Quest Nutrition, a multi-billion-dollar company that transformed the health and wellness industry. She is also the founder and host of Women of Impact, co-founder of Impact Theory, and bestselling author of Radical Confidence. Lisa’s mission is to use content creation to empower women to break free from limiting beliefs and embrace their full potential. Connect with Lisa: Lisa’s Website: https://lisabilyeu.com/ Lisa’s YouTube: www.youtube.com/@LisaBilyeu Lisa’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisabilyeu Resources Mentioned: Lisa’s Book, Radical Confidence: 11 Lessons on How to Get the Relationship, Career, and Life You Want: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Confidence-No-BS-Lessons-Becoming-ebook/dp/B09JPHK9C3 Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: What is the journey of Lisa Bilyeu from housewife to entrepreneur?
Each day, that drip of water is draining on you. And then over time, you end up doing something or being something that you'd never dreamt of. That was exactly what happened to me. I grew up with orthodoxy. I end up in America, married to a man of my dreams, having these big audacious dreams.
But how on earth did I end up for eight years being a stay-at-home wife, taking care of my husband, which was the thing that I didn't want to do? It's not that it's bad. There's anything wrong with being a stay-at-home wife. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it wasn't what I wanted. And I asked myself, how the hell
if I had such big dreams and I went to college and I knew what I wanted in life how the hell do I end up doing something for eight years that I despise and when I look back it is absolutely the drip that ended up happening on the rock that became who I was so my dad tells me every single day that I'm going to be a great Greek wife my grandmother tells me if I'm running on the streets and I fall
She literally, the message she would tell me is she would pick me up off the floor, wipe off the blood and say, oh, it's okay, you're going to be fine by the time you get married. The messaging that that's doing, right, this Greek woman to this little susceptible Lisa that's telling me that don't worry, no matter what bad things happen in your life, the goal is to get married.
Once you get married, life will be fine. So there's no surprise that I ended up living a life that didn't serve me, living a life that wasn't mine, but living a life that absolutely was the path that my parents created. Now, the question is, how the hell do you get out of that? Most people end up living their lives in that space.
Most people end up living their lives for the greater good of other people, especially once you've started. Once you're in it, you're like, well, I can't upset so-and-so. I can't say this. I can't change my mind. I can't let this person down. I can't, I can't, I can't. That's one part. The other part is you put off your own dreams because you're living in service of other people.
So what you end up doing is you say, I will do that when? I will go for my dream once my husband is happy. I will go for that dream job once my kids are in college. I will fill in the blank, do that when something else happens. Now, what you're doing is you're using an excuse, but that excuse feels real. And that's where it gets complicated.
Because in those moments where you're self-soothing yourself and you're telling yourself, don't worry, you're doing it for the greater good. That can be wonderful, right? You're doing it for your kids. That's a beautiful feeling. You're doing this for the family. That's a beautiful feeling. The problem is, is that the excuse ends up getting in the way of you actually living out your dream.
And I ask anyone listening right now, if you want to get shaken awake, ask yourself this question. What if the when never happens? So if you say, I'm going to do this when my husband is happy, what if he's never happy? I'm going to do this when I've got enough money in the bank. What if you never have enough money in the bank? What if that when never happens?
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Chapter 2: How do beliefs shape our identity?
Are you okay with living in the means of where you are now? Are you happy doing that job? Are you happy doing that activity? Are you happy or are you just putting off your dream? Because you think eventually one day that excuse will go away, which spoiler alert, it never will.
It becomes comfortable to stay stuck and it becomes harder to get out of the stuckness. You have a beautiful story of you come to study film, you come to the U.S., which I think it's out of your comfort zone as well. So leaving Greece, leaving the family, coming to the U.S., so you already had that drive. But something caused you to then push yourself and start compromising.
Talk to us a little bit about that. Because again, a lot of our listeners are people that are driven. They're like you. They want more. And they're suddenly found yourselves a fraction of who they could be. And they're not sure how to get out of that.
Yeah, I mean, I think it came from the idea of being a people pleaser, making everybody else happy. That's number one. Number two, I think it came from using gratitude as a piece to get through. And then what I realized over time is that gratitude of being grateful that I've got a husband that loves me. I'm grateful that I've got a roof over my head.
All these things that I was grateful for, I had to recognize, turned into toxic gratitude. And what that meant was the thing that helped me in the first year or two, like, all right, you're a housewife, you're not quite happy, but you know, I'm really grateful that I have a husband that loves me, right? That feels good.
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Chapter 3: What are the dangers of people-pleasing?
That second year, the third year, the fourth year, when you get to like year six, where you're using that same gratitude piece, it starts to become toxic. So now imagine my dreams and my desires are getting louder inside my head. They start off like a whisper, like, are you happy? And then they start getting louder and louder and louder.
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.
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Chapter 4: How to tackle online hate with grace?
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.
It's so easy to talk about, so hard to do. And somehow you're starting to work with Tom on Quest and you're starting to take more and more responsibility, including management, and you never learned any of it. It's totally out of your comfort zone. Lisa, can you talk a little bit about this shift?
Because it's a massive shift, you know, especially when you hear those eight years and where your confidence is. How did that shift suddenly happen?
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.
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Chapter 5: What is the importance of having a clear mission?
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.
Chapter 6: How can practice lead to success?
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.
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Chapter 7: Why did Lisa choose her mission over motherhood?
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.
So eventually I just said, okay, I know I still have to reach a goal. I have to command respect with the team. Otherwise I'm never going to succeed. We're not gonna be able to ship these bars out in time. So I said, what do I know? Forget about all the lessons that I'm reading. What's in my heart? And in my heart was they were guys who loved hip hop. I'm a freaking hip hop fan.
I grew up in the 90s. I wasn't listening to pop music. I was listening to Tupac, Biggie. I wanted to be a rapper. If I really could in another life, Ilana, I would be a rapper. So in saying that, I was like, hang on, this is something that's really genuine. I freaking love Tupac so much that I know half of his music. I probably know 90% of the lyrics because I've learned them so much.
So I was like, I love freaking rap music. These guys like rap music. On a busy day, instead of cracking the whip, if you will, and just yelling and being like, work harder, work more. I'm just going to connect with them. And so I went out to the store. I bought these big speakers. I put them in our shipping facility.
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Chapter 8: What strategies can help handle emotions in business?
And every time we had these big orders and we were on a clock because you've got these big trucks coming to pick up the orders, I would blast the music and I'd be like, all right, guys, who can rap faster than me? Now, what I would do is when I would use rap as the analogy, right, because we would have to wrap pallets with plastic and
Now, what they don't realize is by the time I hired them, what they didn't realize is that I used to do their job. So they saw me as this woman that's working in the office that doesn't have any idea about what they're doing. And what I realized was I needed to show them that I knew what it was like. I needed to show them that I knew how hard you had to work in this department.
And I had to make it fun. No one wants to just work hard. So I would do these competitions. And with Blast Tupac, I would have these rapping competitions where I would make people try to see who could beat me with rapping these big palettes. And I'm quite speedy. So like we would rap while rapping to Tupac. So you're doing the double entendre, right? You're rapping and you're rapping.
And at the end, if someone beat me, I would give them free quest bars. Now, what that did, multiple things. That number one showed the team that nothing was ever beneath me. I was willing to do exactly what they were willing to do. It showed them that I wasn't stuffy, that I actually had something in common with them.
And that was the fact that we appreciated rap music for the lyrics, the meaning behind it, et cetera. And it showed them that I was willing to be a teammate, that when things get hard, I was willing absolutely to roll up my sleeves and jump in with them. Now, over time, That absolutely commanded respect.
That wasn't something I learned in a book and that wasn't something that anyone could teach me. It was just me stabbing in the dark, trying a bunch of things and then realizing the thing that worked for me and connected me to my team.
Now, I know that was a really long story, but I take that and I echo that type of thing in everything I do, whether that's building my YouTube channel, whether that's building impact theory, that idea of as a leader, you need to show by example, you need to be a part of it, people need to have fun. And now I use laughter as a metric in my company to know how my team is emotionally.
So that's really a big lesson that I learned in that whole scenario.
Oh, that is to me so, so, so important, Lisa, right now, because one of the things that I see continuously in your book and in everything that you do is that emotional intelligence, that EQ and those instincts, that you somehow able to figure things out completely out of the box. It's not something that is learned. It's more experimentation, I guess. And it's just figure things out.
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