Hello everyone. This is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert.
I have such a fun guest today. His name is Jim Palmer. He’s a marketing and business building expert and he wrote a number of books, but the one that I’m just most happy about right now is the Just Say Yes: Create Your Dream Business and Live Your Dream Lifestyle. Because today, what we’re going to be talking about work from home or boat. Yes. He and his wife live on a boat and they work from there and he’s built a business around it. I love stories like this because if you can’t have the lifestyle that you want or lifestyle that you enjoy, then I don’t really … What’s the point? It’s hard to get up in the morning and face some of the stuff that comes up in either your job or your business if your lifestyle doesn’t really reflect the freedom that I think we all crave.
Without further ado, I want to welcome to the show Jim and we’re going to dive into what this looks like for him. Welcome, Jim.
I believe all my powers come from God.
Tonya, thanks for having me. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I can tell.
It is. I’ll share with you all. Jim and I were talking before the show and I’m like, “Oh, forget it. We should just start the recording,” because we were talking about so many really neat things and the intersection between the two of us and our perspectives. This will be a good talk.
To start it off, we’re going to ask, what are your super powers?
My super powers. Well, I believe all my powers come from God and He’s blessed me with really a very strong skill in terms of branding and marketing. I think the second skill which I’ve mastered probably in the last five years, I started coaching eight years ago, was really helping people push through their own self limitations. My clients call it tough love, but I can really get them to do things that they never thought they would do. If you want to grow a dream business and make a significant income and achieve financial freedom, time freedom, things like that, that’s not for the faint of heart and everything has to go right to do that. I think that’s probably my super powers. Interesting phrase.
It’s so funny that you would say it’s not for the faint of heart. I say that phrase probably four to five times a day. It really is. My thing is I attract a ton of people who are here to change the world. That’s the whole perspective that tomorrow’s change agents are who we serve. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve gotten more and more vocal about, are you sure you want to do that? Are you really sure? Because trust me when I say that there will come moments that will challenge even the most courageous and brave of all of us.
This goes back to the lifestyle conversation with regard to … I think a lot of us get into this for a number of reasons. We feel compelled to be of service in the world in some capacity, but also because I think we always have that niggling feeling of, I think there’s more to this. I think I can be doing more or I can be more or I can have more. Maybe not in the sense of material items but have more in terms of fulfill
I can do my job anywhere.
ment. I do think that motivates a lot of us.
How did you get into all of this and really seeking freedom and purity of lifestyle choice?
It’s really a journey and everything happens over a path. I do a lot of Facebook Lives now. I did one two weeks ago that I said, “Nobody escapes crap in their life.” It’s like going through crap will make you stronger assuming you go through it, but it also defines you and it also helps make clear what it is you’re supposed to do. You and I haven’t discussed this, but I’m just guessing from the way you’re talking, I think we’re all here to serve other people. I think there are things that … I think everybody is blessed with a certain skill or talent. Not everybody, first of all, recognizes that and then not everybody manifests that to be as great as it could be if that makes sense. We kind of just go through life.
Sometimes we have what I describe as a 3:00 AM holy crap moment where if you do decide to become an entrepreneur or even in your personal life if you’re trying to go for a career advancement or something like that, but let me just go with the entrepreneurial example. 3:00 AM holy crap moments, what I say when you’re lying in bed, you should be sound asleep, your eyes are wide open, you’re looking at the black ceiling. It’s pitch dark in there and you’re going, “You know. Holy crap. I haven’t had a new client in three weeks. Holy crap. I don’t know if I can make payroll. Holy crap. I haven’t paid myself and I own the darn business. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.” Everybody experiences a lot of holy crap moments in their lives and what you do at that moment is … It really defines whether you’re just going to keep going and muddling through or whether you’re going to excel and do something that will take your business to the next level.
How this all came about is I started my … I lost my job when I was 41 years old. I was VP of marketing for a training company. I went through about 15 months of unemployment and I also had cancer for the first time 12 months into my unemployment, so it was a dark, dark time for me. Very scary. I decided to start a business and become an entrepreneur in October of 2001. I’ve been doing that ever since. About five years in, Tonya, I had a fairly successful business but I was reaching a peak and I didn’t know how much I could keep growing by myself. I was a chief cook and bottle washer. People could relate to that term. I was doing everything and I was really maxing out. That was a time when I decided to transition and I started learning about internet marketing, et cetera. I grew multiple six figure businesses online. Then I started coaching and I’ve been doing that for eight years.
There was a point about, let’s go four years ago, I kind of lose track of time, but when I said, “There’s got to be more than just filling the check book. There’s got to be more than work and work and work and more and more and more.” That’s about the time we bought our first boat and Stephanie and I just loved the boating lifestyle and spent weekends on the boat. Like you and your husband, Tonya, I can do my job anywhere, but she had a land based job, so to speak. When she left that last year, we were suddenly free. We said, “What do we want to do with our lives?” I was 58 at the time. She was 57. We raised four kids. We lived in the same house for 28 plus years. We decided to sell the house and buy a boat.
One of the scary things was that what I describe in the book, Just Say Yes, is the what ifs. The what ifs really start wreaking havoc on your mind-set. What if this? What if that? I’ve never driven a 50 foot boat before. I’ve never been in the ocean before except on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. What makes me think we can do this? Then it comes down to, we need to go on this big adventure because life is going by very quickly. Next thing you know we’ll be 80 or 90 and it probably won’t be safe to do it. I don’t want to sit back and look at Stephanie and say, “Man, we should’ve done that.” Hence, we just said yes and we’ve been on the adventure of a lifetime.
I love everything you’re talking about. Before the show, we discussed too we had a short stint of that. I shared when Justin went to Afghanistan and Neva and I, Neva was two at the time, I found that we just weren’t home ever. I was like, “Why do we have a home? What are we doing here?” We had moved a lot. Justin and I both as individuals, prior to us connecting this lifetime, had moved a lot through the military government but also just wanderers. That’s just kind of in our blood. Then when we got married, we did the same thing. We had the same pattern. The idea was that when he got back from Afghanistan, we would settle down. We could really live anywhere, so why not figure out where we wanted to be? We just kept traveling.
It was so freeing. We talked about how that starts to unpack certain belief systems that we have. A lot of us shape our lives not even really knowing what motivates us to shape our lives, what stories we have that maybe we weren’t consciously aware that we picked up or what fears we have or all of this garble gook. Until you start pulling back those layers, you can’t see choice really, or know what it is, or even know if you’re in choice or anything else. I feel like those big bold moments like you were talking about, even if you don’t know that … You had no empirical evidence that you could actually do this, but it’s like, so what? What’s the worst that could happen? I think those bold moves remind us what it feels like to feel alive. It’s easy to forget.
It’s really true. When we moved on our boat in April of 2017, we didn’t go on some tiny little, “Hey, let’s go half an hour down the river on the Chesapeake Bay.” We drove the boat to New England, which was 22 plus hours.
How does that not surprise me?
We drove through New York City and up the east river. We saw the Statue of Liberty, but I had to keep avoiding these big shipping barges and the taxis that take people to Liberty Island and I mean it was almost as bad as it is if you’re in a taxi in Manhattan. It was kind of crazy, but somehow we did it. I think when we got to Rhode Island, I don’t think we took the boat out for a couple of weeks because we were pretty tired. We kept saying, “Do you believe what we just did?”
What became apparent was that I think for more than a few years, we’ve been sort of on autopilot. Steph and I felt like we’ve done everything by the book and raised the kids, had the house, had the nice cars, took care of everything, paid our taxes. We did everything like we should. The next for empty nesters like us very often is going into a townhouse or something. I started broaching that subject ling the driveway and taking care of downed trees. I was just tired of all that. She didn’t want to just move to a townhouse. I didn’t really either. I just didn’t want to deal with the constant maintenance.
Then when she came up with the idea of living on the boat, it was like, “Holy smokes.” It was like boom. It was like you throw open the windows and all the sunlight came in and it was like, “Wow, that’d be really fun.”
Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, we’re going to take a quick break. We’re talking to Jim Palmer. Before we do though, Jim, where can people go to find out more about you?
dreambizgroup.com. It’s a free Facebook group that I run and do an awful lot of free training for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, we’re going to be right back. Stick with us. We’re talking to Jim Palmer about work from home or a boat. We’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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