Freedom to Lead - with Skye Barbour

Freedom to Lead - with Skye Barbour

Leaving a successful corporate career to start your own business is scary enough. Doing so while 5 month-pregnant with mommy guilt attached, Skye Barbour has proven that all of us have a choice.

Today a freedom, leadership, and business coach, Skye helps other entrepreneurs to create a life full of freedom identifying and removing 4 leadership blocks.

Skye Barbour is a voice for freedom of choice, and this is her story.

[1:25] Be a great mommy or make a great money?
[4:48] 4 blocks that keep you small in business
[10:55] Responsibility and burn out
[15:26] Do what you do best
[17:42] Mindset challenges, perfectionism and critical block
[22:39] Leadership, independence and vulnerability
[26:11] Slow down to speed up
[29:25] Message to the past self
[31:55] Message from the future self
[33:28] Freedom Blocks quiz

“True strength is when you step into your power, and you recognize the things that you should be doing, and you recognize the things that you shouldn’t, and you find brilliant people who are better than you to come and fill those voids .” – Skye Barbour

Connect with Skye Barbour
https://skyebarbour.com/
Take the freedom block quiz
http://skyebarbour.com/quiz/

Follow Skye Barbour
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/skye_barbour/
Linkedin – https://uk.linkedin.com/in/skye-barbour-7995a645?trk=pub-pbmap
Facebook group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/leadwithskye

“So often we commit to the scared selves, and we’re trying to do what we think we should want . And it’s a recipe for a failure”. – Victoria Rader

Move away from fear to love with our 5 minute free meditation FROM SCARED TO SACRED
Get it here yu2shine.com

Create your 2022 with Manifest mE journal . Learn and lean into the Universal laws of manifesting that bridge your dreams with your reality.

Happiness is possible, and we have 2 amazing apps that can help you achieve that!
Start your day with a blessing or a powerful random message aligned with what you need the most at the moment from iHappy mE app

Download iHappy mE on Apple App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ihappy-me/id1495559535
Download iHappy mE on Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yu2shine.iHappyMe&hl=en_US&gl=US

Affirm your day with iHappy Daily, set a reminder to receive a message at the time you need the energy boost.

Download iHappyDaily
on Apple App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ihappy-daily/id1457918684
on Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yu2shine.ihappydaily

Check out my seed-based supplements that boost my immunity and give me energy! https://rainintl.com/vicarader

Victoria Rader [00:00:02] In the world of many internal and external voices the voice you listen to is the voice that dictates your life, would you like to discover a clear path to a life of freedom and fulfillment? Then welcome to All About the Voice podcast, where we focus on awareness, alignment and action in order to live a life of abundance. I am your host Victoria Rader. 

Victoria Rader [00:00:28] Leading a successful corporate career to start your own business is scary enough. Doing so while five months pregnant with money guilt attached, Skye Barbour has proven that all of us have a choice. Today, a freedom, leadership and business coach, Skye helps other entrepreneurs to create a life full of freedom. Identifying and removing four leadership blocks here is Skye, a voice for freedom of choice. All right, and here with me is super CEO. Money on steroids. The leadership guru herself Skye Barbour. Skye welcome to All About the Voice podcast. 

Skye Barbour [00:01:09] Thank you so much for having me Victoria, what an introduction. Thrilled to be here.

Victoria Rader [00:01:15] Now I would love to know how you ended up doing what you’re doing. How did you become freedom leadership business coach? What’s been your journey? 

Skye Barbour [00:01:25] It has been quite a journey, so thank you. I was really fortunate to grow up in a very entrepreneurial family. So where retailers and also farmers and so I grew up in a very entrepreneurial parents, but I learned pretty early on in life that you either could be a great mummy or make great money. So my parents very much split the roles my dad felt the financial pressure of earning the income for us, for children. My mother gave up her business to have us fall and look after us to be very present, and I saw what business could enable you to do and the limitless opportunities. But growing up, I saw how you could either do one or the other, and I wanted to be able to do both. So I had this big dream of always having my own business, but I didn’t know how to do that and be the parent I wanted to be. So my parents, having the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship and working really long hours and very hard encouraged me after university to go into corporate life, which I did. And I was really fortunate to work for 10 years and a great corporate firm that taught me all about leadership. And at the age of 27, I was fast tracked and I was leading teams of 250 people, like over 40 million turnovers and dealing with every single challenge that that brings. The biggest advantage to this role was I got to see how you could run a business that you didn’t have to do everything anymore. And I had all of operational foundations, the team foundations, you know, the client customer facing foundations to be able to see and run a business that didn’t need me doing every single thing. So when I had this burning desire to run a business, I now had the capability to be able to do it in a way that didn’t just need me. And I saw all around me friends, family members, other entrepreneurs who were running their own business. But they kept hitting a ceiling because that was limiting their financial goals, as well as their time because they couldn’t go beyond them. They were just stuck doing, doing, doing, doing. And there were only so many hours in the day and I thought, Right, I know how to do this. I’m going to start this business and I’m going to support busy entrepreneurs, create time so they can do more of the stuff they’re brilliant at. And that was kind of my mission. 

Victoria Rader [00:03:44] Mm-Hmm. You know, it’s fascinating as you talk about leadership and what you are describing in the leadership language. John Maxwell has the law of the lid right that your business cannot outgrow your personal growth as an individual that you can intuitively arrived at. And there’s so much to unpack, and I want to go back to your story, but there’s just such gold to which you’ve mentioned. First of all, I loved mummy or money. Oh my gosh, I’m going to totally attribute it to you the first three times and then, you know, just adopted. No, I’m just kidding. But I love that mummy or money, you know, for every woman out there that it doesn’t have to be a choice. And I’m sure you’re going to tell us how to have both. But you’ve mentioned something that piqued my interest. You talked about seeing the patterns to lead blogs to leadership. So what have you seen as the biggest challenge in leadership that you’ve seen both in corporate world and now that you’re working in business and business coach? What are those biggest challenges 

Skye Barbour [00:04:43] That the challenges Victoria are exactly the same being in corporate business or in your own business. People often ask me, like, what’s the different challenges you face as a startup versus a sort of seven eight figure entrepreneur? And I had to like questions like they are the same thing. I attribute them to my four freedom blocks. So there are four main traits that I see come up for people which act as a bit of protection to keep us small. And these are the responsibility block. So it’s the belief that everyone else’s needs comes before your own. There’s the independence block, which is about being super strong and resilient and feeling like you need to take it all on. There’s the critical block, which is all about it’s not going out there until it’s perfect. And then finally, there’s the busy block so that trying to get everything done on the to do list, then it will be OK, but not really looking what’s going on in the surface. And I saw this, whether it was my older, I was in a very male dominated Korea. I was the youngest female in the whole company of sort of 300 at my level, and I saw all of these things play out. I see the same things play out with my brand new mums in business, start ups and everything in between. And they are the main challenges like of these large boulders that get in our way and that unless we can recognize them and shrink them, it keeps us from creating freedom because they keep us stuck in the doing of business rather than actually building a business that’s going to be sustainable long term. And that’s what I’m all about. How do you build a business that doesn’t burn you out? Because too many have love that, but 

Victoria Rader [00:06:28] I love that, you know, you’ve talked about the burning desire there a minute ago, and I’m thinking, Yeah, and I see that I call it the honeymoon effect. People have the burning desire they get in and then the honeymoon is over and I love and all of a sudden there’s stress. And if stress is not addressed, it becomes chronic stress and chronic stress become addressed. It becomes burnout. And if burnout is not addressed, it’s a chronic burnout and there are those four blocks you’ve given. I’m going to come back to those juicy blocks with you, but don’t want to take you back. I’m going to take you back to your story because, you know, when I wanted to go deeper, you were still in the corporate world. So what happens there in the corporate world that you’re absorbing all this information and you decide to follow that inner polling to do something else? What happened? 

Skye Barbour [00:07:19] Well, the plan was only to stay in the job five years, but I kept progressing, kept getting bigger challenges. I adored it. I absolutely adored it. But I got a new store. So I was running supermarkets and I got a new store and the team were. I got a challenge. My boss said, Look, Sky, this team think they’re the bee’s knees. Like they’re the best thing since sliced bread and they’re not. The metrics aren’t good enough. We’re having a whole cultural change. Everything’s changing in the whole retail environment. This store need to like, pull their socks up, and I don’t know how many metaphors I can use, so I think they’ve got to take it to improve, and you’re the person you need to change the entire team. And I went in there and the entire collective management had over 300 years of experience just in this one shop. So we’re talking about like 40 people in a role, and that’s me bouncing into my late 20s needing to. I hire, fire, retire change would dramatically reduce up staffing costs, massively increase customer satisfaction in a short timeframe and all in a picture of like real challenge when it came to retail in the UK market. And I knew it was going to be a tough job. And essentially I came up against some real tough people who at the time I got on with it. And, you know, we can all look back in hindsight, and I know I could have done things better and differently, but I did the best I could in that situation. But what I found is the responsibility block came up for me, and instead of putting pressure on people who were underperforming and who weren’t doing a good enough job, I ended up doing more and more and more of the work myself. Staying longer and longer and longer hours, and I was just at my wits end. My Fuze was so short my personality started to change and I started to hate the job. I managed to sort the team out and we had lots of people get promoted and people move on, and ultimately it turned it around and to be a really great place. But in the time between, I also got taken like it was like a tribunal. It was like an internal grievance procedure about something I’d handled. And anyway, it turned out absolutely fine. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but the whole process of going through that, I felt so vulnerable and I’d never felt like that before. And I’d already put myself in hospital with burnout. And I thought, like, now I’m feeling vulnerable. I’ve got to do something different. I know I’ve got to do something different. I’ve got to make the leap this like pedestal dream job that I thought I had. I wasn’t having at that particular time, so I went through that. I then turned it round and then I left the job and the store on a high. And leaving starting my business on a real confidence boost. But at that in-between dark stage, being in hospital, having like emergency MRI scans for like brain hemorrhages and things because of the physical symptoms, it was a really dark time and I knew I had to change something. And it’s why I’m even more passionate about entrepreneurs not getting into that place too, because corporate or in your own business, it can happen to all of us. 

Victoria Rader [00:10:24] You know, when you talk about that responsibility and literally putting you in the hospital, you know, I talk about subconscious programing off. If it is to be, it’s up to me, right? With that kind of be the underlying block of that. So maybe you can give us a little bit more of a depth for each one of these blocks of whether responsibility is responsible for everything. And I think so many of our family here can relate to that, especially women. Do you find that women just decide were responsible for it all? 

Skye Barbour [00:10:55] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, this superwoman complex comes into some of these blocks as well as, you know, lots of different theories we can take into it. But with the responsibility, it’s this deep passion and care for every one in your life that you just want to wrap everyone up and protect them and care for them, whether that’s your children, whether that’s your family members, your partner, your team, your clients, you just want to look after them. And where I see this going really wrong as it keeps people stuck in the done for you services for way too long because we just want to do everything for the client and not let them take their own responsibility. It has us wanting to rescue people at times in our families or in, you know, our team members. So typically, I see people with strong responsibility blocks feeling like the pressure themselves, but not wanting to tell a team member that they’re not doing a good enough job. They’d rather like, put their head in the sand and not deal with it, rather than pull someone up because they don’t want to hurt their feelings. They feel so responsible as though they’re the ones that have made them do a bad job, which sometimes obviously is the case. Like, you know, I often turn them around business owners. But when you’ve got a really strong responsibility, block, ultimately your purpose, your vision, everything you wanted this business for comes to the like really late last, you come last and everything else comes first. I mean, this is obviously the dramatics of it. But I see business owners have such wide like services because they just say yes, the people boundaries are blurred. If you find it really difficult to say no because you just want to help. Charging can become a challenge, and this is the responsibility that keeps coming up saying like, No, it needs to be you, you need to take this on. But ultimately, if you do that, if you stay in the done for you service, for example, there is only so many hours in the day. There’s only so many people you can help. There’s only so much you can earn. And if you can’t bring a team in effectively and manage them effectively, you’re going to stay small. And that business is going to build in resentment in the future and you’re going to stop doing it. 

Victoria Rader [00:13:03] Beautiful. Now my understanding is you’re shifting out of this corporate world and out of this self assumed responsibility and you’re five months pregnant. Yeah, just kinda. That’s kind of a story. They are. You’re assuming a whole new responsibility. So how did you handle the transition? 

Skye Barbour [00:13:23] Not brilliantly. They’ve got to be a lot. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Not brilliantly. I went into like massive panic mode. I had this weird thing, this like story. I’ve been telling myself my whole life that my drive was going to go after I’d had a baby. My drive was just going to go. So there was this real ticking time bomb pressure of like, get the business, go and get the business going and get the business going before the baby comes. My world is going to change and my ambition is going to disappear or something, which doesn’t happen. No one really tells you that, and I just thought that was going to happen. So the other challenge I had with my baby was nine weeks premature. So he came a little bit earlier than planned. We were in hospital for a lot of the time. So at this stage, I was very much validating experimenting. And in all honesty, I had felt the fear of like this critical block come up. So I felt like I wasn’t good enough to teach the leadership stuff I wanted to teach. And so I started by going into public speaking and just dipping my toe there and wanting to communicate all about like this podcast, all about your voice, like how two women have their voice heard and corporate? Is this something I was really good at? But it didn’t quite sit right. But I just wanted something like, I wanted something tangible. You know, my family are all like bricks and mortar business people to say like I was doing online coaching. Although I’d done the qualification, it just so much mindset stuff was coming up. I felt the time pressure of the baby. I didn’t handle it brilliantly. Then he was born, where I was in hospital for quite some time. But I was like, Right, this is it. And I felt more passionate and motivated than ever before because this was about my family’s future. And I probably spent the next six to nine months after that, experimenting no pressure. I had done like various other experiments that had brought me out, like a financial nest egg, essentially from doing a hospitality business and various other ventures. I was always trying different ideas, but nothing was sticking until I just decided like I’d done a lot of internal work and I was like, Why am I not going for what I really, truly, truly want to do? I was just scared of judgment. I was scared of what people thought, and when I decided to put that on the back burner and just do what I do best, it all started to align and I started with working with people one to one. And I was very fortunate, very quickly to start working with some extremely well known in the UK online entrepreneurs who were sort of hitting the seven figure mark because they needed team help. And I was known as the team person because team created them time and then they were able to grow their businesses. And next minute they’re like doubling, tripling their businesses because I started with team. But what they really needed was leadership skills. So I came at it from that angle, and now I own the leadership and the freedom from the start because I truly believe you need to lead every level of business, not just when you’re hitting seven figures. It’s not just about a team. It’s about making sure you do the things that you truly are brilliant at in your business and in life. I look holistically like, Do you need home help? Do you need cleaners? Like, How do you want to create and design a life where you do things on your terms? 

Victoria Rader [00:16:42] So how did you hush that critical part of you or did you push through it any way? How do you coach your clients to deal with that particular block? 

Skye Barbour [00:16:53] Great question. So I’ve developed a framework, the full freedom framework. So to me, full freedom is giving you time, freedom, financial freedom, clarity of what you’re doing and like purpose as well as choice. And to do that, we need practical things in place because when you are just the doer in the business you’ve like, role just leaves up and you’re juggling all the plates. You know you doing social media one minute then. For me, I was like bouncing a baby the next minute. Then I was doing the cooking that I was doing, the accounting that I was delivering with clients. When you’re that doer, that’s when you’re really restricted. You need to get to the director of your business where you’re that visionary in the CEO role. And to do that, it takes structure. It takes system. So things are out of your head. It takes support. You need the right support team and you need to play to everyone’s strengths. You need to be really focused on bringing everyone together to work to the same goal. What I kept seeing, though, was people, including myself that knew these things but still got stuck. So it’s like, well, knowing how to do things is not enough. There’s some other mindset challenges, and that’s when I really started developing my inner leader work. So within my framework, there are the practical things that I just talked about. And then there’s the personal side of it. So how do we bring out and truly uncover your inner purpose? How do we blast through and make sure we’ve got that positivity for your work and what it is you do? How do you give yourself permission to slow down when all you want to do is do super fast? How do you actually step into your power so when it comes to the critical block in particular? When you’re critical, like you want everything to be 100 percent. Well, if you think of like a scaling lot, one hundred percent being right at the top, the only way is down. There’s no better than that. The only way is down. So automatically, people go negative because you’re never going to achieve the top or rarely going to achieve the top spot, you’re more likely to be disappointed. So what I recognized was when I worked on people’s inner positivity, we were allowing them to then move over this critical block and they were able to start sharing what they did with either their audience about a new offer or with people in their team because they were no longer so critical to think it’s only me that can do this and need control. They were able to see what’s possible. So rather than limiting and shutting the lid and staying stuck, we opened the door to see what was possible. And I do that through various meditations and inner work, as well as the practical stuff too. 

Victoria Rader [00:19:16] And something I wanted to circle back to because it was so key to me with what you said is that you only could pursue and eventually succeed in what you’re doing because you were true to what you wanted. Yeah. You know, I talk about the sacred and the scared self. So, you know, it’s a commitment. So often we commit to the scared selves and we’re trying to do what we think we should want. Yes, and it’s a recipe for a failure. So I think it’s very important that I mean, talking about to the listener here today that it is golden here because you might be listening to it and you are a stay home mom and you are happiest doing just that or you are a business woman who is single and driven and you are happiest to do just that. Or you all wear a sky, finds herself with mommy money. I love that. I just do. Right. So but take this gold and whatever that critical voice of telling you, you should have something just kind of muted and find what it is that you want, because I just think I loved how you brought us back to that saying, I said, Wait a minute, what is it that I want? You know, what is it? I’m gifted in and I absolutely love that. So we kind of got your responsibility. We got you a critical block. 

Skye Barbour [00:20:40] Can I just raise one point where you say be true? Because I think you and I are very similar in this front that whatever people choose, there’s no judgment. I have some clients who work 100 hours and they come to me like, I’m overworking. Can you help me get to 60? Whereas I have other clients who work 20 hours and then I’m overworking? Can you help me get to eight or to six? And there’s no judgment about how you want to work, how you want to parent, how you want to live your life as long as it’s your life and you’re not living it on behalf of what you think other people want for you or what you think society wants you to do. And I always come back to this because I think that’s in the online space. It’s very easy to see like people who have laptops and cocktails and, you know, thinking that this is freedom. To me, that’s not freedom. That’s my idea of hell. And on my keyboard toddler running round like trying to eat the sand around me. No, no. Thank you. So you know what? My version of freedom like running around the farm and address and wellies is not your version of Freedom Victoria, and it won’t be yours either as a listener. But the message I want to get back to is that you have the freedom to choose to live the life you want to. It is within you. And the most amazing thing about running your own businesses as the boss you are in control is your choice. 

Victoria Rader [00:21:59] So you can love it. Absolutely love it. So want to go back to dig a little bit deeper on the next two blocks? How about independence? Yeah, that whole thing of I don’t need anybody. 

Skye Barbour [00:22:14] Yeah, I’m fine. Stay strong. I mean, it showed up so much in corporate with my male colleagues. When I found out it was in hospital, I phoned them all. I was like, This is just happened to me, like, we need to raise this. And five out of 20 of us in our area had been in hospital on the same week. None of the others had said anything. None of the others they were satisfied, even like, You’re raising your voice about this. Like, We can’t talk about this. Like, we need to be leaders. We need to be strong. Leadership isn’t just about strength or alpha or ego. It is sometimes about the vulnerabilities of sharing about what when things go wrong. And that’s why I’m always passionate about wearing my heart on my sleeve. The independence block just wants you to stay strong, and so you believe that just by doing everything that makes you powerful or by holding all the strings of like a puppeteer that and knowing exactly what’s going on with everything and everyone in your business that makes you have control and strength when really true strength is when you step into your power and you recognize the things that you should be doing and you recognize the things that you shouldn’t and you find brilliant people who are better than you to come and fill those voids. So having that independence block and typically I see this in family life as well, when you are that family member that people come to in a crisis, you are that one that like matriarch one or you’re the one that always organizes the holiday or the Christmas event coming up. It’s always down to you. And maybe you quite like that. Just the question. But equally, how is that limiting your growth? Because it is limiting your growth. Everything has to come through you. So that’s, you know, it’s empowering. 

Victoria Rader [00:23:56] And as I’m listening to you, I can tell you how it’s reflected in my life and in my language, having had that block. And that was, you know, I got to a position where I was a leader in most areas of my life. I was the source and I actually had a prayer where I said, Wait a minute, if I am it, I’m not growing. And let me tell you, that prayer got answered real big. I know have people in my life that explores a consistent nosebleed for me, you know, as God did not diminish my ability to lead. It just expanded my horizons. So at least that’s how it showed up in my life, this whole thing. So I tell people, when you become the authority, not an authority. Probably a good moment to say, Wait a minute, you know? Yeah, it’s a humble pie. I think that one was, for me, a humble pie, the whole independent block. 

Skye Barbour [00:24:52] Yeah. And I looked like my dad, who is in his 60s, and he’s still the one delivering deliveries on a weekend, unable to work because he will not delegate it because he thinks he’s the only person that can do the job well. And I’m like, You just so and that’s what he chooses. So I try not to judge, but I know it’s also because he thinks there’s no other way. And there is another way, which is what I’ve always in another way, there’s always a choice. There’s always a choice. So the last one is a busy block. So this shows up with a lot of my entrepreneurs who are just speedy. So you might notice that you talk fast, you walk fast, you’re always like dashing. Do-do-do is like the more that’s on your list, the better you are, the more buzzing you are. And it’s maybe the saying like, we want something to get done, give it to a busy person that could be you. But in all of this business, you’re like a horse out of the gate before anyone else is even registered that the race is starting. And so to keep up with you is very, very tricky. Now that is amazing when it comes to innovation and creativity. That is also a nightmare when it comes to team members because they have to do a job.

Victoria Rader [00:26:05] job that is such gold. 

Skye Barbour [00:26:08] And the idea of like, OK, so we’re going to write a SOPs for how you do. This is like for some of the busy block, that’s like a noose around my neck because you’re just slowing them down. And if you say to someone like, Oh, you’re stressed, like, just take it some time out. They know, like, that’s more stressful. I just got to keep going. I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And what I recognize with clients is when they’re in that space, there’s something that they’re not listening to internally. And when they give themselves permission to slow down and to register what that is. And typically, the practical step here is to start system as it is to take what’s in their mind and put it down in a way that other people can follow. So the recipe of your business is no longer just in your head, you’re actually opening the doors for other people to come in and help you. But being this like frantic one and you see it like, it’s just what’s coming into my head right now is somebody in the kitchen like trying to cook a Christmas meal and they’re like, all the pounds are everywhere in the stuff like this chaos and someone’s coming to help, but they just don’t know where to start. That is what’s happening when you’re in a busy block. And people I find entrepreneurs is they get so far that their schedule, their calendar so booked out with clients and they haven’t even got time to bring anyone in to help them because they haven’t got any of the foundations in place in terms of system ization. And I’m talking about like processes rather than just automation here, and someone can’t just come in and then like, work out because it’s all in their head and they find that say to someone, you actually have to take a step back here, which might mean a drop in income for a little short period to be able to double again. That takes quite a brave entrepreneur to do that. But when they do and have this one client who did this and she was doing twenty five months and now she’s doing like 200 K months, and she’s had to do this several times. Take back, slow down, get it down on paper, what’s in her head? Give yourself permission, bring other people in, grow and then move on. Sorry, I know you’re on a podcast. I’m getting very animated here this. 

Victoria Rader [00:28:08] Oh, I love it. I love it. I think there’s just so much gold in what you’re sharing these four blocks. And so I could talk to you for hours. I really could, and I find myself guilty of that desire with with amazing guests like yourself. But I do want to gift our family here with the three questions I usually ask as they get to really know you. And so you’ve covered these four blocks and you’ve talked about the freedom to choose, right? I want you to go to some point at your life where maybe it was the darkest moment in your life when you felt you couldn’t choose. I know a lot of people feel they can’t choose and whether it is because of those blocks or for any other reason. If I were to have you find kind of the toughest moment in your life that comes to you right now and as you come to that moment, what do you need to hear that Sky today has to offer to Sky back then? Because I know that voice will carry through the time in the space and will be healing to you at that moment. So tell us where it is, what it is and what you need to hear. 

Skye Barbour [00:29:25] Yeah, I really love this question. It’s taken me to a car park as corporate life is taking me to a car park where I open the door to step out to go into work. And I have a panic attack and my heart is racing. I can’t catch my breath. I feel physically sick. Everything’s spinning and I feel completely lost, lost. And in a minute I’m going to have to wipe away the tears, stop the trembling, calm myself down and walk into the store in front of hundreds of people and pretend to be OK because they need me at this point to be OK when I feel like I’m crumbling and a fraud. And like, everything is going wrong. That was one of the darkest moments I’ve had because I truly doubted at that point. I truly doubted that I was good enough or my ability and my ability, and I let other people’s opinions and criticism of me when I was in a, you know, doing something that was very challenging. I taken that so to heart, I felt so utterly responsible for every single person’s pain point, whether it was in my control or not, that it wasn’t letting me sleep and it wasn’t letting me live a life and I was drowning in it, forgot the second part of that question by the 

Victoria Rader [00:30:46] to the market. Oh, it’s beautiful. So what made you now go to that moment? And will you tell yourself now? 

Skye Barbour [00:30:54] Yes. So when I think back to that time, it’s knowing that this will get better. There is another path. And you can choose to do this differently. But you need to take perspective. And I was so in it that I couldn’t see what else was going on around me, but I felt so responsible that I couldn’t just take a day out and just get a different viewpoint and change my state. I felt like I had to be in that and it was toxic. So the advice I would give anyone in that situation but myself at that time is it’s going to be OK. You are good enough. Take some time. Walk away. Take some space. 

Victoria Rader [00:31:40] Come beautiful, beautiful. And going forward in time, 20 years from now, Sky comes over the future sky and she sits down by what would she tell you? Would do you need to hear today? 

Skye Barbour [00:31:55] Oh, goodness. So the immediate thing that’s coming up is this constant. I’ve made quite a lot of changes in my business the last few months. And you know, when something clicks and you’re like, Oh, this is just feeling any film momentum building, it’s that 20 year old 20 plus year in the future self saying to me, You’re right. Keep going. Keep going. Believe. Keep going.

Victoria Rader [00:32:23] beautiful. And then if you only had one message, the most important message that you would want our all about the voice family to remember you by? What would that message be? 

Skye Barbour [00:32:37] I’ve mentioned a few times, but I want to come back to the fact that if you’re listening to this, I’m going to assume we’re in the fortunate. I don’t know the percentages of the world that have the ability to have the internet, and therefore we have the opportunity to improve our life. And that dream that you hold that vision, you have that the way you want your life, business home to be, you can make that happen. You have that power within you. You just need to choose and you have that freedom to choose. 

Victoria Rader [00:33:10] I love it. You have the freedom to choose. And you guys additionally have freedom to choose to take an amazing assessment test on Skye’s website. I’m going to leave the link there, Skye to spend a minute telling us about that assessment before we say thank you.

Skye Barbour [00:33:28] love to invite you. I’d love to invite you to come and see the Freedom Blocks quiz. So it mentioned here about the four blocks that have come up and they see in business owners time and time again, hundreds of business owners. But there’s one that tends to be a primary one that will be showing up for you right now. This specifically at this minute, keeping you smaller than you want to be. I’d love to invite you to take this four minute assessment quiz. It’s fun. It’s not boring and informative assessment, and we can identify exactly which block that is for you. And in there, I give you some free training on how to move forward in your business. 

Victoria Rader [00:34:03] Oh, lovely, Skye, thank you so very much for your time, for your wisdom and getting us closer to be free. 

Skye Barbour [00:34:12] Thank you so much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, Victoria.