239. Overcoming Mindset Blocks: Insider Tips from PR Expert, Lilian Sue

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia Beach and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

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Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together and since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and, of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice and the choice is yours.

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Today's episode is amazing and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at Coach. Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

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Lily and sue, it's such a pleasure to be having you on my show today. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. I really appreciate you being here. Thanks for having me, Sandy. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this because I love talking with storytelling experts.

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So you are a PR coach and a publicist. You're in the storytelling and relationship building business and you're dedicated to empowering creative entrepreneurs to gain the confidence to learn how to push past limiting beliefs and develop healthy coping mechanisms in order to learn how to build and launch successful PR campaigns. I think that people just in life need those skills anyway, right? Not to mention if you're launching a big PR campaign, for sure. I've certainly found in my experience, a lot of people don't realize this.

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It's that mindset is something that actually trumps goal planning and your strategy, because if you don't have a strong marketing and PR mindset, it really doesn't matter what kind of strategy you build or what sort of goals you have, it's not going to move forward the way you want it to. Right? Yeah, for sure. Well, I want to dive into all of that, but I want to hear a little bit about you personally. So what is your story and how did you get to where you are today, being such a powerhouse in the PR industry?

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I started my business primarily on the freelancing side, actually, when I was still a college student. I was looking for paid internships at the time to supplement my degree and hopefully make it easier for me to get a job once I graduated. And I thought to myself, no one's going to hire me unless they can see what I can do. So how am I going to go about finding those opportunities? I went old school and there were days where I was cold calling and cold emailing 40 plus businesses a day.

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Agencies, small businesses, you name it, just to see who would give me a shot and let me cut my teeth to build my portfolio. Spent some years doing subcontracting work and then I had a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners coming to me and saying, is publicity something you do? Because I need somebody to write my press releases for me and I have no idea how to make heads or tails of any of it. And I said to myself, well I'm tired of telling people no, so let's see how this will go and let's see how I can get some work experience in this, see how I can make it work for myself. And I started interning and contracting out with some PR agencies and through that was really able to cut my teeth doing campaigns for small businesses.

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Indie filmmakers was a really big one that I ended up falling in love with. And I spent a lot of years building relationships with media connections in different facets for film and television and things like that. But over the course of doing that, it was two things I kept coming up against. I had a lot of great people say to me, I would love to work with you on a campaign, but I can't afford it. So that was one thing.

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The other thing I noticed with my own clients and also clients that would come through the agencies I was working with, was that we saw a lot of entrepreneurs who had a lot of the same mindset, blocks, limiting beliefs and unrealistic expectations come up about the results that they could get using PR, using marketing. And they wanted sort of concrete guarantees before investing their money. And a lot of that came from a place of fear, of fear of anxiety and also of impostor syndrome, of not being willing to work with us to provide their input, to actually create a fantastic campaign that was going to meet their goals because they thought, you're the expert. I'm just going to push everything to your desk and you can take care of all of it. So when I kept seeing so much of that coming up again and again and again and there were so many folks who couldn't afford to have me come in as a subcontractor or as a freelancer, as a consultant to do the campaigns hands on for them, I said, I've been at this for a number of years now.

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How can I provide that educational piece that's going to give them the knowledge to better understand what public relations is, how they can better work with publicists and PR agencies and at the same time give them the support that they need to move forward in that journey? And that's when I incorporated PR coaching into my business. And with coaching, what I really love with it is that I'm able to sit with a client and we talk one on one. We have really honest conversations about how do you feel about marketing and PR? What are some of the fears that come up for you when you think about sharing your story publicly?

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Why is that? What's triggering these fears? What's triggering that anxiety? How do you typically respond to that trigger and how can we reframe it? Change your perspective on how to, instead of leaning towards the negative, develop healthier coping mechanisms to help you push past those limiting beliefs so that you're not signing on to work with an agency, for an example, and frantically trying to control every aspect of your budget, every aspect of the results, because you're so afraid of not making a wise investment.

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Because you don't have the knowledge and the understanding of how that world works and how a coach, a publicist or a PR agency is supposed to act in support of you but not take over the entire campaign. So for me, what I love about coaching is really being able to. Have. My clients get introspective about why they're feeling a certain way, why maybe their marketing strategies haven't worked up until this point because they've felt a certain way, and they've been on autopilot about it, and they haven't really stopped to examine what's causing them to really grip on really tight and to have so much anxiety and stress about investing their money in order to reach their goals. And the biggest win for me, Sandy, is when I'm speaking to a client in a coaching session and I see the light bulb go off and they go, that's why I've been feeling this way, and there's no shame in it.

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I say to them that my goal here is to not just give you a framework and then walk away. My goal here is not to tell you you absolutely have to do things a certain way to keep the momentum going, to stay consistent. My goal here is to help you understand what's been holding you back from the results that you want in business, from the mindset that you want. That's going to help you embrace the joy and the fun of what it is that you do again, and to show you how to tailor the framework to make it work for you and your specific goals. Because there's so much rhetoric.

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I've seen so much rhetoric just in the industry and with the creative entrepreneurs I work with, particularly authors and particularly women, where you have to be online every single day in order for it to make an impact. You have to be hustling every single day. And so many of my clients come to me and they're like, I'm burnt out. I'm tired. I'm not having fun doing what it is that I'm doing anymore.

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And I just want to walk away. I need to walk away because I've been pushed to that point. And I say to know, I completely understand that because I've been there too at points in my business. I'll be honest, Sandy, I had one entire calendar year where I didn't make any money. I made no money.

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And looking back on it, nothing happened because I was coming at it from a mindset of desperation, a mindset of fear, a mindset of scarcity. And because of that, I was focusing my attentions, my efforts, my energies, all on the wrong things in an attempt to bring in more revenue to keep my business going. And consequently, I was pushing myself to the brink. There'd be days where it'd be ten at night and I'd be still chained to the computer after I had been on it nonstop since six in the morning. And I say to my clients, the reason why I'm always talking to you about focusing on what's going to prioritize your energy and help you build in flexibility into your schedule rather than always hustling is because to me, the hustling part of it is not sustainable.

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Eventually you're going to push yourself to the brink, you are going to burn out. And when I reached burnout was when I recognized that I needed that outside perspective. And that's why for my business, I invested in business coaching. I invested in mindset coaching. I'm still working with my mindset, Coach, over two years later.

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Because I recognize that for me, if I'm going to talk about education and empowerment and have my clients truly understand how public relations is not this huge conglomerate strategy that you need millions of dollars or millions of followers to be successful. I have to be able to show up the right way for me to honor my own energies, to honor my mindset and to show them that I'm not just telling them to do something, but that I'm also living it myself. So I understand where they're coming from. Yeah, you got to walk the talk, for sure. I love that.

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So what your clients are facing is no different than what people face in every single scenario. Right? It's just PR is just fill in the blank. Right. But the limiting beliefs, the fear, impostor syndrome, all of those things are so common in so many professions, whether you're creating a business or you're writing a book.

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I mean, that's the big thing I know with publishing a book. Oh. Who am I? Who am I to be publishing this book? The impostor syndrome sets in and all of those things are just so common.

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And I love that you really niched into your coaching to help people in that specific realm, obviously, and then you can help them with their PR at the end of the day. So what are some of the tricks? Or do you have any mind hacks that you work with your clients on when they're feeling that overwhelming sense of I can't do this anymore.

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And how did that relate to you in terms of your burnout? Because I think that's just so common today, the burnout. And it's becoming almost like an epidemic in some aspects because people are just trying so hard and what they don't realize is when you're trying to swim upstream, you got to go with the flow, right? Absolutely. I have a client that I'm working with right now, actually she is one of my hybrid coaching and campaign clients.

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So we're doing coaching sessions to help her build the pieces of a PR campaign that she can take with her. So the media kit, the media pitches and the media list and then I'm going to step in and do the media relations portion of it for her. So to help schedule interviews and things like that. And she is actually an author and she actually said to me just the other day, she said, I'm really struggling with creating the media kit because I don't know what to share in my bio. I feel like even though I've written three books, I still don't know what I'm doing.

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I don't have anything worthy to say to people that will make it interesting enough for them to tune into an interview. So I said to her, here's a mindset mantra that I use for myself to remind myself whenever I feel shaky in my foundation when it comes to putting myself out there. And actually I'm actually going through that right now given that I'm working on releasing my first book too. So it's interesting that you bring that part up. But I said to her, one of the mantras I use is I remind myself of how far I've come by looking at my history, by looking at what my audience has told me, by looking at what my supporters have told me.

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And the people who have worked with me have told me this is the positive impact that I've made. And that means that what I'm doing is resonating with people. And because it's resonating with people, this is what I lean into. This is what I hold on to in moments of shakiness, in moments of doubting. The process.

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A lot of my mantras when I work with my mindset coach on it is trust the process. Because you create the damn process is something she says to me on a daily basis. And it's true because you do create the process. And I said to my client, I said every single day that you are working towards the goal of getting your story out there, of building those relationships with readers. If you can do one thing a day that's going to move you closer to that goal, it's an accomplished day.

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That's how I see my work days. It's a great accomplishment. I'm satisfied at the end of the day, I'm not stressing myself out. And most importantly on a daily basis when I focus on what I can control and the knowledge that I have on that day, in that moment, I know that I'm doing the best that I can to the best of my ability, and that's it, that's all I can do. Everything else is let the chips fall where they may.

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And that's exactly what I was saying to my client. And that's exactly how I try to live my life in my business, particularly with working on releasing my first book. It's my first nonfiction debut. PR book known as the Powerful publicity prescription. And I named it as such because in this book, I don't just dive into, hey, this is how you create a media kit.

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I start from the beginning to show people this is why PR is powerful historically. This is what it's been able to do. This is how you can apply it to your goals. But in order to truly understand how to make it work, let's dive into mindset. Let's dive into why you feel certain ways about some popular myths around PR.

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Like a lot of the entrepreneurs I've worked with, particularly women, have said, well, I don't have $20,000 to throw around for a campaign and I'm not a celebrity, so it's not for me, it's not going to work. And what I debunk for them and what I demystify for them in this book is that you don't need all of that to make it work. What you need is a strong mindset. And that doesn't mean you'll never feel that fear, that anxiety, that impostor syndrome. Again, what that means is when it's triggered, you can recognize what's triggering it.

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You can allow yourself a moment to kind of sit with it, understand where it's coming from, and then you have the tools in order to push past it, to keep going. And what I do with my clients is I use a combination of mindset mantras. I really encourage them to adopt meditation practice, self hypnosis practice. These are tools that I use on a daily basis to keep me even. And it's really helped in regards to just giving yourself that calm, that peace, understanding that for this moment, on this day, for right now, you're safe, everything's okay, nothing's falling apart.

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And you're going to approach what you need to do today to the best of your ability. And if you do that, then it can't be a bad day because you've done everything that you can control.

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For me, in working on this book and diving into the mindset and also getting into things like goal planning and getting specific about because I hear it all the time, where they're like, I want more sales. And I'm like, that's great, everybody does. But it's not specific enough. I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's not specific enough and tangible where you can actually work towards it. So let's dive a little deeper, get a little bit more specific, and then you can talk about building a strategy that's going to help you move towards those goals.

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Right. And in working on this book, I've really had to lean on my own Mindset tools to remind myself that whatever the outcome is publishing, preordering, selling books, whatever it is, I know the goals that I have that I want to manifest, and I know what I'm doing to work towards them. And moreover, I'm confident in the content that I'm bringing to people, the value that I'm bringing to people. And when you have that, Sandy, when you have that kind of unshakable confidence in know I know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

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Well, no, I was going to say that when you're speaking so confidently, people can feel that there's an energy there's like a magnetic force that people can feel. It's almost like the outcome of that, whether or not someone buys the book or whatever it is, it almost doesn't matter. It doesn't doesn't matter? Yeah, it doesn't. Because when you're in alignment with your purpose and your passion, the chips will fall as they may.

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And here's the thing, though, about books, is that some people published a book, and ten years later, it became a bestseller. So why did it take ten years? Who knows, right? Maybe their mindset wasn't in the right place. Like, who knows?

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Maybe the world wasn't ready to receive that message. Who knows what it is? I love what you're describing, and everything you're talking about is a recipe for just daily life.

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Well, absolutely. And it doesn't just apply to business. It applies to personal relationships. It applies to personal growth. And just having the freedom like, the biggest thing for me in doing the couple of years that I've done Mindset work has been is the freedom of being able to let go of that need for control.

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Yeah. I can't tell you how much it changed my life.

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It triggered a chronic illness in me, that need for control. I mean, I lived for eight years where I'd have flare ups. Like, my anxiety would cause flare ups. And there were nights where I would lose five, six, 7 hours of sleep. I'd be on my living room floor in a fetal position in pain because my anxiety wasn't going away.

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I couldn't get to sleep. It was triggering actual physical pain. And at one point, I basically said, you know, I'm tired of living like this. I want to be able to sleep. I want to be able to feel refreshed in the mornings.

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I want to be able to let go of the things that I can't control. And in doing the mindset work, I think I came to the realization of how so much of that is rooted in my upbringing, is rooted in the cultural traditions that I had to live with growing up, and is rooted in generational trauma, of course, in letting go of that need for control. What I had to do was to go back and recognize that I did the best that I could to protect myself with the tools, the knowledge and the skills that I had and the life experiences that I had. I did the best that I could, and I needed to forgive myself for not being able to do what I thought I needed to do at that time. And once I did that, it was like a giant boulder just fell off my shoulders.

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And it made life so much easier and it made approaching business so much easier. And a lot of the uncertainty when it comes to growth, when it comes to putting out new projects, when it comes to even figuring out on a daily basis, have I done everything that I can to show up and add value to the people I want to speak to?

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Just that you're even asking yourself those questions makes you above and beyond so many other people, because so many people just live their lives and they don't even question their motives, their actions, their thoughts, any of those things. So I just want to applaud you for that because that's huge. It's a huge thing. And not only are you going to benefit, everybody around you is and then your clients are just getting it's just a total bonus for them as well. I appreciate that.

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Yeah. And I definitely try on a daily basis to add value and to be present. And the other big thing is to show gratitude, to not take for granted where I'm at in life, who I have in my life, the tools that I have and the things that I've learned and I know a lot of my clients have, too get so scared of failure, get worried about failing, get obsessive about avoiding it. And then when I change my perspective to failure is not failing. If you actually learn something from it, whatever it is that you're doing, if you're able to take a step back and then go, okay, what worked, what didn't, where do I feel like I need to change what I did for next time?

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Right? Because so long as there's always an opportunity for you to grow, to change, to learn from things that happen, I don't consider it failure. It's just education. And we could all benefit from more education because absolutely, education is empowerment. And to me, my business philosophy actually follows this one proverb pretty quickly, closely, and that is if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day.

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If you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. And that's something that I talk to my coaching clients a lot, because I had heard from a lot of entrepreneurs who said, I did a PR campaign with an agency, got results, got interviews, was on the radio, and everything else. Came through the other side, though, and felt like I didn't get the results that I wanted and I didn't get the results that I wanted because I didn't feel comfortable speaking up to somebody that I believed was an expert and who could take care of everything for me. And that was sort of a linchpin moment for me in a sense that that's the reason why I love coaching. That's the reason why I want all of my clients, whether they come to me for coaching, campaigns, workshops, what have you, they always leave me with more knowledge, more resources, and being better served than when they started.

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Because the last thing I want to see is to see somebody lose momentum and worst of all, lose hope because something didn't turn out the way that they wanted it to. And now that fear, that stress, that anxiety is preventing them from moving forward the way that they want to. When you have that education and you have the tools to back up that education, then you have the confidence to do anything. You're empowered to do anything, and nobody can take that away from you. And that's something that I really try to impart to my clients.

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I love it. That's amazing. So when is your book coming out and what is the title again? It's called the powerful publicity prescription. And I did that because I wanted the alliteration and Prescription is kind of a play on plan, on blueprint, on framework, that kind of thing.

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It's going to be coming out with a companion glossary and a workbook because I want to be able to have people understand the definitions of terms and everything that's used in the book and also use the workbook to actually take action on what they're learning in terms of building a strategy. So right now, my plan is to hopefully have things start releasing in the first quarter of 2024 and for the new year. I'd also love to be launching a podcast just like we're talking right now, to really sort of give folks more in depth access to me to get their questions answered about PR, to learn from other marketing experts as well in regards to how all of that fits together. Because all these different aspects of marketing are not silos anymore. It's only ever successful the more you connect all of it together and how it feeds into each other in terms of content and in terms of promotion.

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And the reason I'm writing the book is because I had people in my audience say, following you on social media is great. I'm getting the actionable tips and the strategy, but I want to be able to follow the whole picture from beginning to end. And I thought writing a book is a great way to sort of give them that, to give them those real world examples and those case studies that they can bite on that is really focused on their industries to really show them. If you're thinking about it, this is how you can go about goal planning. This is how you go about building a stronger mindset.

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This is why all of these popular PR myths are wrong, and this is how you go about like, these are even some of the tools you can use to save time on doing media contact research, to save time on sending out pitches. And towards the back half of the book is all about, hey, great, you have that interview. It's gone live. Now what? And now, yeah, really focusing on helping people figure out how am I going to promote this thing that's going to get me in front of the right audiences and have them learn how to trust me.

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Because I think and understandably too. So many small businesses and entrepreneurs go for social media and email first because there's a low barrier to entry, and they spend a lot of time studying what other people in their industries are doing right. Whereas with PR, they get scared off about they're like, oh, I don't want to sell. It seems too salesy to me. And I actually was just talking to a prospective client about this a couple of hours before you and I got on here, and I said to her, It's about reframing it.

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It's not about selling something. It's not about selling your book. It's about how am I building the relationships I want to build in order to share my stories with the right people. Because it's impossible for all of us to get in front of every customer one on one, individually. So to shortcut that, PR is about figuring out who out there, podcaster, writer, whatever platforms out there have the reputations and the credibility with their audiences that I can sort of leverage to get in front of their audiences in order to get my story out there.

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And what that means is their audiences can learn to trust me. So when you look at PR as a way of relationship building in order to share your story, it becomes a lot less intimidating, and it's just about getting to know people and having them get to know you and really finding that synergy to build partnerships together to help each other. Because I'm a huge proponent in community. It's not competition that we're in there's enough for everybody. Oh, for sure.

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We're always better for it if we're able to figure out how we're amplifying and supporting each other and our stories and our, you know, PR is the best way to do that. Yeah. I love it. Lilian, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.

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Before we finish up, is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience that you haven't mentioned thus far? I would say to anybody who's thinking about possibly getting started in PR or figuring out some ideas to sort of get out there and start sharing your stories, but they're scared about it, I would say at the end of the day, focus. On what your story is, because you know that like the back of your hand. Focus on what your story is and take those incremental steps to get out there. There's always going to be somebody in your network who knows somebody or maybe that person's able to go live with you just to have a chat.

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Take those small, little incremental steps forward, and I think you'd be surprised to see how far you can go and how rewarding it is when you share your story and you can see it resonate with audiences. I love that. That's so awesome. Lilian, thank you so much. And I know I was like, we're getting raised up.

00:40:23
My son is calling me right now, so that's a good time to stop the recording. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for having me. Sandy, thank you to everybody else as well.

00:40:48
I certainly hope that you enjoyed today interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you. And your family are healthy and safe. And that your lives are filled with peace, joy, and happiness.

00:41:03
Take care, everyone.