100. Transcendence of Timidity: Podcaster's Journey to Influence and Leadership

Once upon a time, my voice barely reached the ears of even the closest listener. But today marks the centennial celebration of "Milk and Honey with Lemon," where my once-whisper has grown into a clarion call resonating with hearts and minds. We're honoring the lessons learned from the Proverbs 31 woman, alongside my own transformation from a faltering podcast host to a beacon of leadership and productivity. Discover the behind-the-scenes narrative of our journey: from mastering the art of podcasting with the aid of AI technology to curating a daily life as rich and organized as the Rise app that propels it. I'll be unfolding the story of my initial stumbles and the divine encouragement that led me to a path of impactful communication and self-betterment.

This 100th episode is a mosaic of the poignant, the powerful, and the personal, mirroring the very essence of growth. It's a shared experience, where I peel back the layers of intensive speaker training and leadership academies that have sculpted not just my abilities, but also the very soul of this show. Tune in to hear how the fear of inadequacy was overshadowed by the power of perseverance, and how this transformation has forged an unbreakable connection with you, our listeners. It is a testimony to the influence of inspiration and wisdom, and an invitation to continue this pilgrimage together. So, as we turn the page on this chapter, let's step forward, ever-seeking, ever-growing, anchored in the trust that the divine plan we unfold will be just as sweet as the honey we've come to adore.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Stepping Into Milk and Honey
• 6:44 Podcasting and Speaker Development Journey
• 17:27 Inspire and Share for Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey friend, welcome to Milk and Honey with Lemon. The Bible says in Numbers 14-8, and if the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us safely into that land and give it to us. It is a rich land flowing with milk and honey. On this podcast we talk about stepping into that overflow that God has for us by becoming those ultimate Proverbs 31 women. Hey, I'm Lemon. I am just like you, sister Friend. I knew God had something more in store for me, but I couldn't see a way out of the laundry piles and, frankly, I resented that. Proverbs 31 woman. How was I going to live up to the hype? That is until I found out how to really step into becoming this Proverbs 31 woman through leadership development. In this podcast you're going to find financial freedom, leadership, growth and motivation so you'll be able to do all the things God has called you to do with ease and really step into that land of milk and honey. Y'all, welcome back to the Milk and Honey podcast. I am so excited because we're recording episode 100 today. How crazy is that? I want to give just a little behind the scenes and talk about some things that I've learned and how I've grown over the last year-ish since we started the podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:13

So quick backstory. I started a podcast back in 2018, and it was, hands down, probably one of the worst podcasts to ever grace the internet. I will just be so honest about it. I was so looking for a way to get my voice out there that I actually didn't stop to consider my niche and I had a theme. I had a theme, guys. It was so bad. I had a theme, but there was no cohesion to the theme at all Whatsoever. There was zero cohesion. I just brought anybody who wanted to be on my podcast onto my podcast, which is not helpful. It was so scattered, it was so disjointed, I didn't publish things on time. The audio quality was bad. I just didn't know what I was doing and I can own that and say this was a really bad podcast.

Speaker 1: 2:06

And so, in 2022, god was like all right, lemon, it's time to do another podcast. And I was like absolutely not. I am not doing another podcast. The first one was so bad. It is so embarrassing. I'm like I am not doing another one. This is not my skill set, god. And he was like yes, it is. He's like you're better equipped. It points out I point out all these things that I'm like I can't do this, and God, of course, has an answer for them. I'm like and at that point I had already co-hosted the Be in Bolden podcast with my friend Naomi and we were talking about our experience with high control groups, religious trauma, all those things.

Speaker 1: 2:43

So I had been co-hosting a podcast for a few months at that point and so I was in a better groove, things were going okay, and someone God was like you're going to do this by yourself, you have better skills, you've developed as a leader, you have all the equipment. So my husband went to school for audio engineering and production and part of his tuition came with an interface and all of these fancy things. So I could have better quality when you watch any of the big fancy podcasters. They've got the headphones and the big microphones and they've got, they have an actual interface to record their audio. So I'm not recording into my computer at all, I'm recording into this interface. And I didn't understand any of the technology. But my husband did, and so I was like I guess that's good enough for me. And I'm like God, what am I going to talk about? And he said you're going to talk about leadership development. You're going to talk about the proverb 31 woman and I'm like, oh, I had so many feelings about her. I felt like it was such a Such an unrealistic standard, such an unrealistic standard to maintain. Now I feel a whole lot differently about it. I think there's a lot of principles we can take from it. I actually was just texting my friend, molly, who was on the episode on the show on Monday and actually just found an app called Rise.

Speaker 1: 4:01

This is not like a plug for it or anything Like I'm not like sponsored or like I'm not getting commissioned, but it was tracking my sleep schedules and my circadian rhythm and all those kind of fun things to tell me my most optimal times throughout the day and like what activities I should be doing throughout the day, which 10 out of 10 made a huge difference. And I'm like I wonder if the proverb of starting one woman knew her circadian rhythm and knew her optimal times, because I have gotten more accomplished by 9.15 in the morning and I've only been working for about an hour. Then I have, in the last week, I've gotten so much done because I'm working at my optimal time. So, anyway, all that to say my great God, I'm gonna do it. And so I start this podcast and I'm like we're just gonna see how it goes.

Speaker 1: 4:45

Most podcasts do not make it past 20 episodes. So the fact that we're celebrating 100 is mind boggling to me, absolutely mind boggling. And I'm like, all right, god, I'm gonna do it and I start. I start the podcast. I'm like listening to some people on how to start this podcast and I'm doing the things and it's so amazing to witness the growth. And so I actually just had this happen this weekend. Like, of course, as I'm like getting ready to share this podcast and all of these things, I'm like, all right, here we go, I'm gonna start the podcast, I'm gonna do what God's called me to do.

Speaker 1: 5:22

And this weekend, my friend, lacey Nelson I'll shout her out because she is such a good friend of mine Lacey messages me and she says hey, I started listening to your podcast and she said I hear a difference, a huge difference in you. Now I'm gonna be your first starter. So she's like I went all the way back to your very first episodes to compare the growth between January of 2023. And this is now March of 2024. But of course, she was listening to episodes from February and so she's there is so much authority and growth in you and in your story and in the way you show up, and it was just such a cool experience for her to to share that with me. I feel really privileged that she shared that, because when you're in it, when you're in the day to day, when you're doing the editing and doing all these kinds of things that you have to do for a podcast, there's so much that goes into it and not that I'm complaining, I love everything about it. I could do this full time, I could podcast full time and be so happy with it and so anyway. So Lacey shares that. She sees the growth in me and there's so many things that have happened between launching that podcast and today's episode, and so I wanna share some of the growth that has happened in me personally to get me here to show up this way.

Speaker 1: 6:44

So one I studied a lot on podcasting. I have hired mentors, I have worked with people and that, I think, has been huge for me. It's just learning the tech pieces and making sure that I'm showing up the best way that I can, and so learning the tech, learning the ins and outs and learning how to do things a whole lot easier. The software I use is different than when I first started, which thankfully, too. When I started podcasting in 2018, ai was not a thing Like it, just it didn't exist in the capacity to exist now, and so now I have AI and it goes and it removes filler words for me and it removed, which I can. Also, I love doing because I can see a difference between how many filler words it had to remove in the beginning versus how many it has to remove now. So that's been huge, but it will do things for me. It will summarize the episodes for me. It will give me things that I need to make this go a whole lot faster, which is incredible.

Speaker 1: 7:41

The other thing I did is I have done so much leadership development and speaker development in the last 15 months since the podcast launched. So when the podcast launched, I was just starting radiant leadership and life coaching and learning what it means to be a Christian life coach Absolutely incredible. I've been really privileged that I have that honor. Spent two and a half days in San Diego with about 20 other women just coaching each other and working on our leadership development. So that was huge. It was very intense. I've taken Radiant Leadership Academy again, which is a 16 week biblical leadership program. So I went through that again for a third time. I have now taught I'm on my fourth round of teaching a class of radiant leaders, which is incredible. So I've done that. Now this is my fourth round. And then I've done speaker training twice and that was a nine week intensive and then it culminated in two days of very intense speaker training, a ton of speaker training, and so we had to get on stage for a dress rehearsal, share stories, which was a lot, and then the next day you got a recorded version, you got a full speaker reel, which again was incredible, and I got live feedback from four different coaches and mentors and it was incredible. It was just an incredible experience. But then I spoke on stage. So I spoke on stage twice for that and then I spoke on stage another two times during our annual conference.

Speaker 1: 9:10

I have done so many presentations for Girl Power Alliance. I've spoken in more summits for Girl Power Alliance. I have done extensive amount of training and I make a joke with Michelle Schaefer. She did episode 90 and she was my first podcast guest and her and I were talking and I said I will never forget the first time. She asked me to open a call for her and I am so glad that it has also been scrubbed from the internet because it was the worst call ever. It was so bad and she tells me all the time that it's not bad. She's actually wish you had been worse. She would be cooler to track your growth that way, but by my standards it was so awful and I am so glad it's been long deleted because that was from June of 2022. And it was just so bad. But there are trainings that I did in July of 2022, still on the Girl Power Alliance YouTube channel, and when I see them I my skin crawls.

Speaker 1: 10:12

I cringe at the person that I was, and I could have let that stop me.

Speaker 1: 10:19

I could have listened to my early episodes.

Speaker 1: 10:21

I could have listened to early training that I've done.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I could have pulled on the experience from my first podcast and never have done this.

Speaker 1: 10:29

I could have done that. I could have sat down and said you know what? This is just not my forte and so I'm gonna walk away from it. But I didn't. God said I need you to do this and I'm so glad that I did, because I get messages every single day and I'm not one of those people who will, you know, you hear that from influencers.

Speaker 1: 10:49

I get so many messages about this. Really, I get a message or a lead every single day in my email, in my Facebook group, on my Instagram, my TikTok, whatever it is. Somebody every single day is reaching out to me to share a takeaway that they've had, to share how this has impacted them, to share the way that they feel like they can connect with me. Lacey said that this weekend. She said we are having the most intense conversation in my car right now and she's I feel like I know you so much deeper. And I've met Lacey in person. We have hugged, we have hung out like she knows me and she's.

Speaker 1: 11:28

But listening to the podcast, she's I know you and I think it's so cool that we have that opportunity to connect and grow with other women. And I look at those experiences, I look at the women who've come to me, the things they've shared with me, and I think about the fact that I could have said no, I could have been disobedient to the thing God has called me to do, because I had every reason in the book to say no, god, I'm not gonna do that. That's not for me. I tried it once and it failed, and I'm so glad that I didn't, and so what I hope you take from this episode today is that if God has called you to something, he will bring you through it.

Speaker 1: 12:12

I was the most ill-equipped person to do this podcast. I was not sure we were gonna make it six months, and now here we are, 15 months in, 100 episodes in, and things are growing so fast To the point that I'm now dropping two episodes a week. If I had stuck to the original one episode a week, y'all we would have enough content to get us through to 2025. It's already recorded enough to get us through 2025 if I did one a week, and I wanna do that to you. And so I have some really fun guests coming up. I've got some people coming on to talk about operating from rest. Ruby Cole's gonna be here talking about bootstrapping a business. We've got speaker training. I have Dahlia from Chickenlandia coming on. She's gonna talk about chickens Because you guys all see my homesteading content, because we're homesteaders and so everybody's been asking me about chickens, so we've got that coming. And Facebook group growth and working with your spouse and leadership development. There are so many things that are coming that I'm so excited for. Guys, I already have season four mapped out, like I have every episode mapped out until the end of the year, so I am truly excited.

Speaker 1: 13:32

I wanna thank you for being a part of this community. I would love it, for episode 100. If you guys would leave a review on the Apple. It tells people, it pushes it out to more people on Apple and it makes the Apple machine happy. If you share a review or if you've already shared a review, share an episode on your social media. Tag me in it, because I wanna do a giveaway for episode 100. I'm not gonna tell you what I'm giving away. It will be something tangible.

Speaker 1: 14:01

I love giving. I love a snail mail. I do. I love snail mail. I did this a few months ago to celebrate our one year anniversary and Sabrina got a devotional from me. So if Sabrina's listening, she'll actually be on the podcast at the end of May, but she got a divo in the mail from me to her house with some cute stickers and all kinds of fun things. So I love sending actual snail mail. So I would encourage you to leave a review and tag me. Send it to me on Instagram. Just let me know that you did that and then, if you've already left a review, just share an episode on your social and tag me in it. I'm gonna do the giveaway next Wednesday, so I will announce the winner of the giveaway next Wednesday on the podcast. So that episode next Wednesday will feature my friend Ruby and she. I'm excited for you. Get ready to leave those reviews, get ready to share an episode. And again, I just wanna encourage you if God is calling you to something, I promise God will bring you through it. He will equip you for the thing that you've been called to do.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Something my pastor said on Sunday which I thought was so profound. He said are you robbing yourself of your purpose because you're waiting till you have the next thing or you are the next thing? Are you in this? Can't wait. Remember one cycle. Are you in this? I can't wait to be here. I can't wait to have this. When I buy land, I'll do this. When I have more money in the bank, I'll do this. When I have the skill set, I'll do this. I can't wait until I'm here. I hear this now. I was just turned 12 yesterday and he's always. I can't wait till I'm an adult, I can't wait till I'm an adult.

Speaker 1: 15:43

And then our pastor was like, of course, kids say that Middle school, high school, they say I can't wait till I'm an adult. And then they say remember when I didn't have to pay bills, remember when my fridge was always stocked, remember when I didn't have the stress and this worry in my life. And I wanna encourage you to get out of the can't wait, remember one cycle and ask yourself, if you are in that can't wait, remember one cycle, are you robbing the people that you were called and anointed to serve by staying in that cycle? Because that is exactly what would have happened if I'd never started this episode or the show. I would have robbed so many people.

Speaker 1: 16:25

We were sitting at about 20,000 downloads for the year and I think about the fact that 20,000 people have tuned in to listen to me, pour my heart out every single week and I know that 20,000 people are listening and I have had some sort of an impact, some small impact. There's one thing, minimally, they have taken from me and if I had been stuck in the can't wait, remember one cycle, if I had been stuck in the, I don't have this, or I don't feel that none of those people would have been impacted in the way that God called me to impact them. So I wanna encourage you. If you feel like there's something God is calling you to do, I wanna encourage you to step out and do it. My friend, I will see you on Monday, where we're gonna have a fun conversation on how does God define leadership and how does that impact you as a business owner. So I will see you next week.

Speaker 1: 17:27

My friend, don't forget to leave a testimonial on Apple or tag me on Instagram with something that you have shared, so I cannot wait to see what it is God is going to do in and through you. My friend, hey friend, what a joy it has been to share today's journey with you. If you found a spark of inspiration or a nugget of wisdom that resonated, would you bless someone else by sharing this episode with them? It could be the encouragement they need to step into their purpose and calling. Also, if you could spare a moment to leave a review, it would mean the world to me. I really appreciate your feedback and it really helps our community grow. Remember, the road to discovering God's call for you isn't one you have to walk alone. So join me again next Monday for another episode where we'll continue to explore the depths of leadership and the heights of our heavenly calling. Until then, keep seeking, keep growing and keep trusting in His plan. God bless you and I'll catch you on the flip side. Bye, friend.