Welcome to the Sword of Sure podcast. Where doubt looms, fear whispers, and the only way forward is through. I'm Samar Carbo, and if you've ever felt like you're just sort of sure about what you're doing, you're not alone. This is where we face the uncertainty. Push past the hesitation, and keep going anyway way. So take a breath, step in, and let's move forward together.

Hello and welcome to the Sort of Shore podcast. I'm Samar Carbo and I'm here to talk to you about imposter syndrome self doubt and the things that keep us from moving forward. If you have a story to share, reach out to me at sort of surepodmail.com now we've got a conversation with Wendy Veloz here and she is a powerhouse. She manifested her way from parts unknown to to the nonprofit world, to government out to her own work, and she has been killing it ever since. She's had imposter syndrome the whole time and she did it anyway. So let's find out how. Let's have a listen.

Hi, I'm Wendy Veloso. I'm a social entrepreneur. I have a business where I coach executives to not only make a bigger impact in their community, but also to increase their income and to be able to grow their business or nonprofit. And I have a podcast where I also interview people like me who are into social entrepreneurship and giving back to the community. And the goal of that is really to help people understand that you can find values aligned businesses and values aligned products that will not only help you and solve your problem, but also will help your community as well. A social entrepreneur is just someone who wants to get to what sometimes people call the triple bottom line, right? So you obviously want to make an impact, but not only are you getting revenue and getting profit, but you're also making sure that social change happens, that people are thriving, that we're moving forward and progressing. And so social entrepreneurs are willing to put their money where their mouth is and not only dedicate time and resources, but really make that part of the business model or part of what they're doing. So especially if they're a nonprofit founder, they might not call themselves a social entrepreneur, they might just be in the nonprofit space. But I definitely include those folks as so pretty much anyone who has a socially conscious mission, right along with the other mission to solve problems and to make money. I started my career in nonprofit working with foster youth who are emancipating from the foster system and then kept going for a while really working in the federal government and the local government. So I've done a lot of work supporting the nonprofit sector in different ways and then also supporting local government, different types of organizations that do work in our community, and just being able to help people, whether it's figure out how to solve problems more efficiently and effectively or to make sure that they're more sustainable in the work. I think throughout my journey, I've done a lot of things that people find interesting. I spent about six months living in a village in Uganda when I was in grad school, and I went immediately from there into a federal government role. So after grad school, I went straight into a role where people are expecting to have information decisions to be representing the federal government. And I had just gotten back from living in a village for six months, so I had no idea what was going on. For the first, probably year or two of my federal career, I was kind of doing the fake it till you make it. Do I belong here? Is this really the road for me? Does my voice have a place at the table? And after probably about three or four years, I really got to know that my skill set was needed, and not only needed, very valuable to the federal work that I was. Stopped feeling so much like an imposter and started understanding that I had expertise and my voice was important to be at the table. Especially being a woman of color, I'd often be in rooms where I was the only person of color representing any kind of marginalized community. So I had to quickly get over that imposter syndrome and come to a place where I understood my value. But then, once I became an entrepreneur and started my own business after leaving the government, which is a whole tale by itself, I felt that imposter syndrome again. And it came back because I realized, oh, I've been in the government for so long, I have no idea how business works. I have never done sales in my life, and all of a sudden, I have to sell my business and market my business. And I went right back into that feeling of, oh, no, is this for me? Am I supposed to be here? Do people see me as a fake business owner, or will they really respect what I'm trying to build? Especially because it's a different type of business from a lot of other businesses. And, you know, over the last four years of having this business, I've realized that I've been able to inspire a lot of people by simply being different and doing sort of what is aligned with my intuition. So I ebbed and flowed through that feeling. But I think we're all vulnerable to when we do something new. Going right back into feeling like an imposter.

So I'm hearing this village in Uganda, then straight to the largely white boys club of government and then straight on rocket ship to business ownership. Was there something about the imposter syndrome that fed you and made you feel like you were sort of living on the edge here?

I don't know if it fed me so much. I think it really held me back. Like, I think there were a lot of times where I didn't take action because I felt like I was, you know, not ready to be vulnerable or not ready to share what it would have taken for me to not feel like an imposter. Right? To really show up fully expressed as myself. And so it more hindered me than it helped me to be honest. And what I had to do to get over that was to really understand what people were giving me as feedback and telling me that that wasn't me. And I had to take that feedback and internalize it to my own perspective of who I was and what value I bring. And it always has taken me to not understand it intrinsically by myself, but to see a reflection from someone else and then go to that intrinsic process and say, oh, I am this person. I do these things. This is recognized by other people. I should recognize it in myself. And so I feel like the imposter syndrome has. It's been more transformational in a sense that I've had to do self work to get over it. I collect people, I collect places, I collect information. And I'm often a connector of those things so people can find value through my experiences as well. And so that network has always been something I've relied on, whether it was when I was feeling not quite up to the task to get refueled by that network, or when I needed something from that network in order to move forward. Being able to go back and ask for the things that I needed. And sometimes if you're feeling like you're an imposter, you're not going to make that out. Like you're not going to go back to your network and say, hey, please do this for me, or whatever, because you're doubting yourself. So it's really difficult to then go and ask somebody else to have faith in you and give you the thing you need. But a lot of the times I've found that when I've been vulnerable with people and said, hey, I really need clients right now, I really need X right now, people in My network will always offer and they'll always come through with an amazing resource that I didn't even know existed, right? So it's important for me, at least in my journey to be able to build those types of connections, to nurture those types of connections, and then to know that when I need them, they're going to provide the value that I need.

How did you put together this group of people? Have they just been around you forever or did you get them somewhere? Did you collect the strays? And if so, how?

Yeah, how did I acquire all the strays? You know, I think people tell me I just have like this magnetic personality where I walk into a room and people are like, hey, I want to know that girl. And I don't really do very much more than just smile and nod, right? Like, I'm just there to meet people and be part of it. But I always come away from interactions with new friends. I know a lot of adults say it's difficult to make friends. I pretty much make friends, like every two weeks, three weeks, I'll make a new friend. And so in some ways it's the law of attraction. Like I put myself in places and in conversations where I'm going to find those types of people. So I'm very intentional with where I spend my time and what I say yes to. But I also tried to do the follow up. And I think this is where people and even me, over time, you know, have gotten away from those. You know, we used to write handwritten letters as a follow up, thank you. And if you remember this, but you know, even after a job interview or anything that you did, someone, a mentor, you would write them a handwritten letter or a note card. And I used to do that a lot. And so now I've moved to making sure that I have a database of these people. Like, I literally have my own client management system, like a CRM that I keep them in. And it's not because they're clients, because they're important networking contacts. And I will make sure that every so often I'm reaching out on social media, or I'm reaching out by email, or I'm booking a call with some of these folks. And so those little tiny pieces of follow up have really deepened and nurtured the relationships so that those people can be a trusted mirror for me. And if I am hearing something from them, that's even negative feedback, right? Because we don't always get just positive feedback. Like we might also get feedback that's neutral or negative. And I'm able to come to those people, no matter what the feedback is, they're going to give me with a sense of humility and openness. And I think they know that they will get that from me. So people feel comfortable giving me feedback or feel comfortable having conversations with me that they might not have with other people. And I think that, you know, it's not so much be attracting all the strays, but sometimes it's really just being able to see that folks are looking for connectivity and to plugging into that and then helping them connect to other people who are similar to them or who are looking for that same type of connectivity. And those over time, those conversations, those repeated contacts, those emails, all of that stuff adds up and gives you social capital with those people. And so now where I found myself several years in business, I have a big network from the federal government side, a big network for multiple travels and places I've lived. Big network from business. Now, now I'm finding that people want to tap into that network and are actually willing to pay me money to have access for it. And that's something that I never anticipated. Right. But it's great for me to be able to give, either for free or if they want to invest in my business, to be able to give access to, to the other folks that I've cultivated relationships over time.

Yeah, that's really huge. Being able to plugged into a network, whether of your own making or someone else's, is I think, kind of a superpower in this world. You can do pretty much anything if you have the people to do it. So that's super cool to hear. So you talked about there being a change from that kind of holding you back, you never having done sales before to now just having to do it anyway. How did you make that shift?

Oh, good lord. A lot of self talk, a lot of self coaching, a lot of coaching from mentors and investing in coaching and just really, I think coming to the conclusion that this is my purpose. And in order to really fully step into my purpose, there are skills that I'm going to need. And whether I have to invest time or invest money in getting those skills or ask questions of people who have those skills, I need to be on the learning side as much as I need to be on the teaching side. So I find myself really engaging in that learning process in order to push myself past some of these barriers. Because like I said, when I came out of the government, I had never done a sales call before, ever, ever in my entire life. And I bombed a Whole year of sales calls. It was not a pretty picture. I would walk around with a narrative in my head that I'm a bad salesperson. And I realized over time that I'm not a bad salesperson. I don't like traditional marketing and traditional bro sales. That's not the way I do things. So my information that I'm giving to people can be different and can still yield a sale. But it has to be unique to me and my business, and I have to feel aligned with that strategy. I can't use FOMO marketing and feel like that's going to bring me the right clients. So some of that learning process was, you know, me having to change my perspective and then see, well, what else is out there? If I don't want to do the traditional ways, what else is there? And what can I teach myself to not do what everybody else is doing. And that's really. It's really worked for me over the last couple years.

Oh, that's great. And so you mentioned a year of sales calls. Is that a year of no sales?

Yeah, pretty, pretty close. I think I want to say, like, the first year in business, I probably made under 20k, and most of that was through contracts and consulting contracts, not even coaching. So I definitely had the calls right. Like, I see them in my calendar as I had the calls, but I don't even know at this point what I was doing wrong. Then I probably could go back and listen to some recordings and see where I was bombing. But, you know, what I did was I just kept moving forward. It was like, okay, that was a fail, or that wasn't a closed sale, or that was a whatever. What can I do with the next one? What can I do with the next one? And I did watch a few of the videos and kind of give myself. I asked for feedback from other people. And that really did help as well. Just being able to move from a place where I felt like, oh, I'm never going to be good at this, to a place that I felt confident in doing it in my own way.

So then how did you measure success that first year? Because I feel like humans typically won't do something for longer than two or three months without feeling like there's some thing coming in. And 20k is not, you know, there are a bunch of people out there living on that, so I don't want to shake a stick at it, but for sure it's not where you were planning to be headed. So what kept you going?

I guess. No. Yeah. Well, luckily then I had A decent amount of savings from COVID and also had unemployment. So we were not living off of 20k. Let's be really clear, it's really expensive in the United States. But what kept me going, I think, was that I saw thousands of people flocking to what I was doing. And it was really interesting because where I wasn't getting sales, I was getting a lot of attention by just simply talking about the things that I wanted to talk about. And a lot of those topics are now, four or five years later, becoming very relevant. Diversifying your funding as an organization, looking at your ability to not only get federal grants and other grants, but to get other types of money for your business or nonprofit. There were some topics early on that I just wanted to talk about. And so I took to social audio, have a pretty decent size following on a couple of social audio apps. And I would just open a room and talk about a topic that I wanted to talk about. And lo and behold, people would flock in and ask me questions. And I thought, okay, if I have this much expertise that people want for free, they will definitely pay for it. And I need to figure out how to move them from wanting it for free and getting access to some of it for free to you get the whole thing once you pay. And that took a bit of time to move that flow. But early on, just seeing, you know, at some point, I was getting 1,000 subscribers on my LinkedIn newsletter a month, which is not normal. And all I was doing is writing stories about what I felt like writing about for an entire year. So that first year, although it was really hard, some of the benchmarks that I met on my own in starting this business, including, you know, getting it registered, getting all of the tax and insurance things done, but then also getting these thousands of followers that are listening to me say whatever I need to say. And then on top of that, setting up my own websites and having thousands of people go there and read the blog too. Then setting up the podcast and having people want to be a guest on the podcast when I was still really new. So all of those wins, they're not monetary wins. They're not always going to equal pushing money in the bank, but they will eventually. And so that first base year was all about building a brand. And I think some people forget that a brand isn't just you putting out a logo and colors and a website, and all of a sudden you're a brand. A brand is about consistency. And so that first year was all about consistency. And the thing that kept me going was I was like, oh, this is fun. I actually enjoy this, and I enjoy it way better than working for the man. So I didn't want to go back to a government job. I didn't want to go back to nonprofit. I really wanted. And I was hell bent on making this business work. And I think because I was so determined and I got that positive reinforcement from seeing people come to the content, that I was then able to just push through and keep myself going. For the last couple of years, whether or not it's been, you know, up and down, money wise, I've always kept focus of there are people who need to hear what I have to say.

What's some advice you would have for somebody who is struggling with imposter syndrome, who maybe doesn't have the support that you had or is just at the beginning of their journey and doesn't see how they could get to where you are?

Yeah, I think we always feel like we want to be where somebody else is at. Like, we're always looking at that marker and we're like, I'm trying to get to where that person is. I'm trying to get there. And I think the biggest part of the journey is just getting to where you're supposed to be. You may not actually ever get to where that person is. That might not be what you're supposed to be doing. But as you go along and you make progress, it's important to celebrate the progress that you made and to be able to understand what that progress has looked like for you and how you got there. Right. And so most of the time when I'm working with clients who are struggling with the same problem that you're describing, they have a really hard time making that celebration happen because they want to sit in the place of not being where they want to be. Right. And that is extremely not helpful for somebody who's stuck taking stock, understanding that you have made progress, celebrating that progress, and then using that to fuel your vision to keep going, that's what will make the difference. And so the advice that I would be to give to people, and this is the process I use. I use something called idea surgery, which I created. And it's a visual mind mapping process where we go through and map out everything of what it looks like today and everything that you want it to look like in the future, where you're actually. Your legacy is created and established and it's all packaged up with a boat. And sometimes we'll do this process every six months or every year. And in that reflection time we'll look back at the old mind map and some of my clients will be like, wow, I didn't even realize how much progress I made. I was just here doing work every single day, doing the day to day grind in my business and I haven't thought about those things that I try. I was triumphant over. So this idea of having a plan or a notepad or something that you can check periodically, you know, 6, 12, whatever amount of months later, go back and look at where you were before and then celebrate any progress that you've made since then. And that process, doing it over and over and over again, it really helped me understand that I was making an impact. I was making progress even if I wasn't seeing it in my bank account and that was the metric that I was using. I would see it in other ways and I was able to then say, oh, recognize that you are valuable, you are bringing value and that sometimes is more important than the money. People want to hear more about these types of topics and they can get onto the social impact level of podcast, which is my podcast where I interview people and talk about these topics. And then also you can find me on LinkedIn or Instagram under Wendy Veloso. And I'm always around so people can join my network as well.

All right, great. Wendy, will you have a fantastic rest of your day?

All right, see you. Bye.

What a great conversation. It makes me think of something that I have to tell myself often. And I think maybe this would be helpful for entrepreneurs or non profit professionals or anybody who has to go a little bit outside their comfort zone a lot. When you start your day, you begin writing a new chapter in the book of your life. But when you end, the day is the only time you get the opportunity to name it. You understand what I'm saying? Life is lived forward, but understood backwards. We have to live the best we possibly can. We have to get out of that comfort zone and we have to do the things that when we look back on them, we'll be proud and we'll have the best possible name for the day, for the chapter. Well, that's it for me. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Sword of Sure podcast on my birthday week of all weeks. If you have a story to share, email [email protected] and if this awakens something in you, please share the podcast with a friend. Drop us 5 stars as a birthday gift to me. We'll see you next time. Later days.