Ep 53 - The Power of Taking Tiny Actions: Featuring Monique Malcolm

 

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I’m thrilled to bring you this conversation with Monique Malcolm, the founder of Take Tiny Action, is a goal achievement expert who empowers ambitious women to reach their loftiest goals through the power of tiny actions!

You can listen right here, on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or you can read the transcription below. Enjoy!

 
 
 
 

Carly: Hello and welcome back. I am so excited for today's conversation. I'm chatting with Monique Malcolm, who I met alongside her amazing sister and family at Mom 2.0 this year, and I was instantly drawn to her. And there are so many things about what we teach our folks that resonate and that are really similar, and so I'm just excited to get into it today.

But first, let me give you an introduction. Monique Malcolm, the founder of Take Tiny Action, is a goal achievement expert who empowers ambitious women to reach their loftiest goals through the power of tiny actions. Her five A's of Tiny Actions framework provides a simple, practical, and flexible approach to goal attainment, eliminating the obstacles of fear and overwhelm.

As a sought-after speaker at conferences and events, Monique loves to speak on stage and motivate audiences to stop letting fear have all the fun in their lives. Outside of work, Monique loves soaking up the sun at the beach or hopping onto her bike for spin class. She resides in Florida with her husband, son, and adorable pup Spike. Welcome to the show, Monique.

Monique: Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me.

Carly: I'm really excited to see you again.

Monique: I'm excited to be here 'cause I have thoughts. A lot of thoughts

Carly: I know and I love it as, as soon as I met you when we got to talking, I was like, you're my people.

Monique: Yes. Yes. That's the power of good conferences. Oh. Because you never know who you're going to be, like in the taco line with, or the free drink line. The free swag line.

Carly: Yeah. I ended up taking a picture with your sister at one of the booths in, you know, the marketplace area later on. And I know I kept running into like your adorable niece and I don't know, it is just, it was really, really, Great to spend time with you guys, but also to chat business because once we started chatting I was like, oh my gosh, we need to bring this convo to my folks. So thank you so much for being here.

Monique: All right. Well listen, I'm ready whenever you are.

Starting the Journey: Overcoming Fear and Making Bold Moves

Carly: All right, well, I'm just going to jump in with my questions. Okay. So I know these days that you help folks quiet what you call the course of fear, and I love that so much and make bold moves, I would love to know how you got started, have you share your story and basically how slash why you got started doing the work that you do.

Monique: It is a winding path. I think all good business origin stories are a really winding path, but I'll try to keep it brief. So I like to create things. I've always loved to create things, and I got started with my very first business online, like 2009-ish or so with a T-shirt line. 

Carly: Amazing. Oh, awesome.

Monique: I've been in this for a long time. So I started with T-shirts and it was, The brand was called Anti Sparkle Apparel at the time I didn't know anything about t-shirts, and I didn't know anything about graphic design. I just knew I wanted to create something. And I saw a screen printing machine in Michael's one day, and my husband was like, you should buy that.

And I was like, why? And he was like, so you can make shirts. Like he said it was the most obvious thing ever. But I didn't know anything about that, so I kind of just downplayed it. But I thought about it and a few days later I went back and bought the screen printing machine and that was the start of this winding road to having this business.

So I did that for probably about five or six years. And as I was doing that, I started finding out about conferences, all these blogging conferences 'cause this is like big in the heyday of blogging. I started attending them. Once I went to a few, I realized that you could speak at these conferences and I wanted to speak at the conferences because at the time when I was starting that clothing line, the T-shirt line, I also was a teacher.

I was a science teacher, so I taught sixth and seventh-grade science. I've always loved teaching and I just thought that I wanted to speak at conferences and teach people stuff that I've learned. That seems like the coolest thing ever. So I started applying and conferences started saying yes, and I started going and speaking at conferences.

And from there I really started getting obsessed with this idea about goals because I would meet people at conferences and they would tell me all of these fabulous ideas that they were doing or that they wanted to do. And I would be like, why are you not doing it? What do you need? And. They would go from like this bright and shiny, like their eyes are shining as they're telling me this idea, like they, what they want to do, as soon as I say like, why aren't you doing that?

To just be closed off and shut down because they didn't feel like they could do it. And that got me on this path of trying to figure out where, and how do we bridge the gap between what people dream about and what they're actually able to achieve. And I ended up creating an entire planner system based on this, the Visionary Journal from there.

I eventually decided to drop the T-shirt line 'cause I wanted to move more into online education and doing things with the planner. And I've done that since, like I said, 2009 all the way to now. But it really wasn't until I wrote the book last year, I really felt like I landed on the thing that I should be doing.

Which is helping people with goal achievement. I think before writing the book, I didn't really feel like I was. I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to do.  There were all of these ideas that I also had, so I had the planner and I was podcasting and I was coaching people and also doing behind-the-scenes website stuff for people.

Most people don't know that, and, I felt like I had all of these ideas, but no real through line. And as I started writing the book and really digging into fear and how that gets in the way. I started seeing the thread, the thread that connected all the pieces of my work. Yeah. And it was this idea of taking tiny action, taking smaller steps because that's how I approach a lot of my work.

I deal with a lot of anxiety, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm. I have ADHD, and the only thing that really helps me progress and stop from melting down is looking at the big picture thing and breaking it down into the smallest pieces. And once I recognized that I realized I didn't want to talk to people only about their businesses.

I didn't really want to build communities and websites for people. I just really wanted to focus on that, like how we achieve our goals, not feel overwhelmed, and release fear by taking smaller steps toward what it is that we want to do.

Carly: I love that you started as a teacher as well because that explains so much when I'm reading the book.

It's just you have such a clear, concise way of explaining things that it's very easy to digest and kind of speaks to you plainly and efficiently. Also in a kind way that resonates with you versus like over your head. And I, I just, I really do enjoy your style of writing so much. And when you said you were a middle school teacher, I'm like, oh my gosh.

Okay. That's, that's it. That's why I love it.

Monique: Yep. That's what happens when you have to keep 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds entertained and teach them things and also not keep them from melting down and you not melting down. You really have to like just approach it. It's a special thing dealing with middle school kids and I do think that informs a lot of my work and a lot of how I approach things.

Carly: And I was definitely the kid where. A lot of times the big concepts would have me melting down. Like I have cried over history, I have cried over math. I can't even tell you how many times because I just felt you know, my brain, I don't get it. And so, anyway, I just appreciate it so much.

I think that's great. 

Exploring Fear's Sneaky Beginnings: Insights from "Don't Let Fear Have All the Fun

So I know in your book don't let Fear have all the fun, which again I'm reading right now and I love it. You give really practical examples of how people can let fear take over the reins in their own lives and how fear can plant roots in your life in small ways that people might not even notice.

And I felt like that was a really important part of the book because. It just lets people see how almost harmless it can be in the beginning and where it can start. Would you mind elaborating on that a little bit?

Monique: Yeah, so one of the things that I really wanted to do with the book was help people feel seen, but also recognize themselves in my story and the stories that I shared.

Something that we don't really think about a lot when we are dealing with fear and how it creeps up is we kind of think of fear as like this heart pounding, racing, just anxiety, feeling this thing happened and now like I just feel like this reaction in my body.  But that's not always how it is.

It's a lot sneakier than that. And it can be in simple things like, You're at a restaurant and you ask the waiter for no ice in your water and they bring you a glass of ice water and now you don't want to say, Hey, I don't want the ice water. Can you just bring me a glass of water? It's a little small request.

It's like being in work and you're in a meeting and, and they're asking for volunteers for this project and you really feel man, I would kill this project. I want to do that. But you're too afraid to raise your hand and say Hey, I would love to be on the team for that project. It's little tiny things like that, that over time start to erode your confidence and that start to erode at your feelings of self-efficacy.

So like your belief in your ability. If you don't start to catch that, it scales up. So it's now you're not only not raising your hand in the meetings at work, you won't apply for a promotion you won't speak up for yourself or you won't pursue trying to find a partner. So you don't want to go on dating apps, you don't want to do all of these things.

It's like a creeping thing, and it starts when we're very, very young. But we don't recognize it. And I think as adults it's important to really think of all the small ways that fear can creep into our lives because it's not always just, I don't want to dive off this cliff, or I don't want to go skydiving.

It's, it's other things like I, I don't think I should apply for the promotion 'cause I'm not the right person for the job, even though you know that you're skilled enough to do it. Yeah.

Carly: I love it. I love that so much because as you're talking, I'm thinking about, you know, 15 other ways that fear can creep in these, like you said, it's super sneaky.

And I think that's really important to bring to people's attention that it really is about these, like small, seemingly unimportant, I'm doing air quotes details, but they, they add up and they compound over time.

Monique: I think in your work, what you're doing with people and helping organize, there's a lot of fear in ways that people don't recognize.

And I'm still wrapping my head around the most concise way to explain this to people. But when I think about fear at its core level if we take out the evolutionary, the science of how it is in our body and we just think about what it is logically, I think of fear as discomfort. Our default state is comfort. We want to be comfortable at all costs. We want to be cool. We don't want to be too hot. We don't want to be too cold. We want clothes that fit. We don't want shoes that are too tight. Like we have a baseline for comfort. And when you are experiencing fear, there's a disruption in that comfort. And so that's that discomfort that you're feeling when you are in situations.

The tricky thing is that you get used to operating at your comfort level, even if your comfort level is uncomfortable and it can be chaotic. So thinking about the people in organizing homes, you have a baseline of comfort, but over time, as you start letting more clutter creep into your house, That baseline resets and now you're adjusted to this additional level of discomfort that it was once, but now it's comfortable to have this clutter in your home.

And you just adapt and you reset. So you do get to a point where what was once uncomfortable and that discomfort has now become your baseline and it's comfortable. And it's really hard to disrupt that. 'cause now you've learned how to operate in the chaos. And that's again, another example of how those little small things can creep up on you.

'cause I really think at its core, it's a balance between am I comfortable or am I uncomfortable?  And, and trying to. Tip the scales mostly to the comfortable side, but if you don't recognize it, you can get on the uncomfortable side, and that just becomes your new default baseline for comfort.

Carly: It's so true and really interesting that you put it that way because something that I tell people all the time is that really, truly one of the hardest parts about the process is just getting started. And when we're in a space, because everybody knows, you know, it always gets a little bit worse before it gets better.

And it's just, it's just how it is. But, a big part of the process of getting in and starting decluttering is really just disrupting the energy because things have settled over time. You know, these, these corners of clutter that used to be like, oh my gosh, I gotta get to that. Suddenly they're blending in.

You can't, you don't even see them anymore. And when we get in there we really disrupt and unravel the energy in a room. Sometimes that's all you need to do is shake it up and then you're like, okay, things have moved a little bit and now I'm ready to work through it and have the decision-making and make things happen.

But getting started is really the hardest part because, to your point, you have to decide which uncomfortable like, which discomfort you need to, you're going to be okay with. I would say that. 95% of people who come to me say that they're overwhelmed when they want to start working together.

And so, it can be that thing that you live with and it's fine. And it's fine and it's fine until suddenly it's not, and it reaches a breaking point. So I want to help people before it gets to the breaking point.

Monique: Exactly.

Carly: I love it.

The Importance of Self-Reflection and Acknowledgment for Goal Achievement

Carly: Okay, so that leads us to the next question because I know you're all about honest introspection, acknowledging our desires, our fears, and our patterns upfront so that we can achieve our goals faster.

So tell us more about this and tell us why it's so important.

Monique: Oh, I could do a whole rant and wax poetic on this. Do I record that? It's because I just want people to stop setting goals all willy-nilly. Like y'all are setting goals with no guardrails. And when I say guardrails, I'm talking about the realities of your life, like you.

I believe that you can achieve anything that you put your mind to, but you have to be within the context of the realities of your life, your resources, your bandwidth, what skills you have, all of those things you have to take into account. And that takes turning inside and really thinking about what I really want and what am I willing to give up to get it.

Because in everything that we achieve, there is a trade-off. You have to give something up to gain something. And I think a lot of times we don't think about that. We are just like, I see this all the time working in like the online space, especially like online business, the creator space. And we think, man, I want to have a six-figure business and I want to be on YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, and I want to do threads and I want to do TikTok. And also I want to be a speaker and I want to travel the world and I want to have a family and a husband and all of these things. And I'm just one person with no team.  Where are you going to get the capacity to do all of those things?

Yeah. That's not realistic for your life. And so that's why I'm talking about these guardrails. A realistic chat with yourself about, okay, this is a thing that I want to achieve. Here's what I have that I can leverage, or here's what I have at play.  But I find that people get really frustrated when they're like, I'm just procrastinating so much and I'm not making any progress on my goals.

And then we have conversations so tell me about what your time looks like in your day. And they're like, oh, you know, I work a nine to five and then I'm home. And I'm like, but it's more than your nine-to-five. Do you have kids? Do you have a husband? Do you have to help get them out the door in the morning?

That eats into your time, not to mention. How much time does it take you to get ready just for yourself In the morning?  How long is your commute? After work, do you commute home or do you have to pick up people? Do you need to stop by the gym? Do you need to take the kids to soccer practice?

And then when you come home, do you need to cook dinner for everyone in your house or is that already taken care of?  And then how much time do you need to decompress after work? 'cause you can't go from work and then jump back into more work. You need time to get your mind right.  And then you need to feed yourself.

How much time do you have left in the day after you do all of those things? 

Carly: Who's cleaning the house? Who's making the target runs? When is this happening?

Monique: All of that has to be taken into account and so that, that honest, that honest introspection is being realistic about what it is you have in your life and setting goals that are in alignment with your capacity, your desires, your life, not what.

Society thinks it's nice, not what Instagram thinks is nice, not what your parents think is nice, what do you actually want and what are you willing to do to get it? But also think about whether you have limitations and what are those constraints and take those things into account. When you make these plans and you set these big goals, it not only helps you achieve your goals faster but you can recognize barriers and challenges upfront.

If you know that you're a person who, when you get overwhelmed, you tend to shut down and become closed off and you can't make a decision, well take that into account.  Now you need to come up with a contingency plan. If you have, if you're struggling with indecision, how are you going to get past that?

 Are you going to journal about it? Do you have a trusted person that you can help, that you can contact to help you make the decision? Are you just going to pick something and just decide? I'm going to go for it and if this doesn't work, I'm going to reverse course. All of those things are important and they help you go faster, and I think they help you go with not being burnt out and not feeling overwhelmed because you have in your mind a contingency plan for how you're going to deal with this, or you know how to best utilize your resources to make them work for you.

Carly: The work that I do with folks, something that I talk about all the time is having an action plan around your decluttering. And I urge people to break things down. Like instead of saying, okay, I'm going to declutter my bedroom, you know, I'm going to declutter drawer number one, drawer number two, drawer number three.

The top of the dresser under the bed, my nightstand, and all these are different steps so that to your point, you can take tiny chunks of time and make things happen and make progress in it. Because what I see happens a lot is that people are, say they're really overwhelmed because they. Have too much stuff and you're like, okay, well I'm going to block off this week and then just declutter for this whole week.

But if you're going from zero to a hundred and you're having to make thousands of decisions every day, you are going to get burnt out by the afternoon of day one. So it's just a lot easier to take it and then to take that decision-making, break it into tiny chunks. Do it in the time that you already have, which is way more realistic for your life anyway.

Be able to make progress but not burn out at the same time. And that's so important.

Monique: You know, my favorite game to play with myself is I'm going to clean up this thing that I've been putting off for a long time in the next two hours before bed. And now I pulled all this stuff out and it's all sitting on the floor, and now I'm overwhelmed and I no longer feel inspired to clean it.

And now I don't know what to do. But when you, when you approach it from that, 'cause all you can think, I, I think this is a big thing. All you're thinking about is the big picture. I can't wait to have this clean closet that doesn't have clothes on the floor and doesn't have empty electronic boxes on the shelves.

You're just thinking about this big picture, and so in your mind, you're just like, oh, I'm going to feel so good when I get that big picture of the clean closet. Yeah, but what you don't anticipate in the process without having that action plan, you pull all that stuff out of your closet. Now the closet might be clean, but all that stuff is somewhere else in your house.

It's on your floor, it's in, your office, like wherever.  So if you had a better plan, like, you know what, I'm going to spend 30 minutes today cleaning the shelf in the closet, and I'm just going to pull out the boxes. And that's the only goal. You only have to make two decisions, get up and clean, and pull the boxes out of the shelf.

And then dispose of the boxes. Yeah. That feels so much better to do in one sitting. Then I pulled all the clothes out and now I need to decide what, am I keeping. What needs to go to Goodwill? What needs to be trashed? Can I give this to somebody? Can I fit this? Like you end up doing a whole fashion show in your room only to realize I have all this stuff that I still need to clean. so I think that your approach like mine is to take the small steps, it just feels so much better and you see instant progress. Yes. You can go in your closet and be like, Oh, I took out, there's no boxes on the shelves.

Look what I did. That's amazing. High five.

Carly: Exactly. Yeah. One of my biggest pet peeves when I watch television shows, and I, I know people are going to be like, oh, like X, Y, Z show. And I'm like, yeah, I know. And I do those shows. But my pet peeve is, is that they. They go in and then they take all the clothes out of the closet, like everything on the hangers, and they dump it onto a bed.

And I'm like, it is so much less overwhelming to go through a closet full of clothes while they're on the hanging rack and just one at a time. Go yes, no, yes, no, yes, no versus take 'em out and then. The hangers are poking you. Everything's getting tangled. It's just a big mess and it's definitely on your bed and you have to take care of it, or you have to sleep somewhere else that night.

It's just it. And people are like, do I have to take it out? That feels really overwhelming. I'm like, please don't take it out. That feels overwhelming for me too. And I do this for a living, so we'll just leave it there, and then bit by bit, we'll go through it.

Monique: I agree.

The Five A's of Tiny Actions: A Framework for Achieving Your Goals

Carly: Okay, so tell us about your Five A's of Tiny Actions Framework and how it can help us when we're setting our big and small goals.

Monique: Okay, so the five A's of tiny action. I'm super excited about this because it is my answer to what I think is wrong with so many conversations around goal setting. I started to realize, Every, that every time you Google or you search, it's like, how do I achieve a goal? How do I set a goal? We all start with a smart goal-setting framework, and while I think it's great, what I realize is that the framework is only good for actually setting the goal If you want a goal that is perfectly set. What that means is that it is like a goal that you know. It's achievable. So it's not just a wish. It's not just a dream, it's something that you can actually do. Smart framework is a good place to start, but after that, what do you do? They're just like, breaking the goal down into small steps.

Great. Then what? Well, I guess you need to do them right, but there are so many things that happen before you do that and after that. So the five A's is what I consider to be a comprehensive approach to goal setting. The process can be applied to small goals. It can be applied to the goals, and it's comprehensive.

And cyclical. So starting at the top, the first A is acknowledged, and that's that introspection self-awareness piece. So we are acknowledging and thinking about our desires and our goals, How do those two align with any fears that we need to unmask and think about ahead of time? So what fears are we holding around these goals?

Also thinking about patterns and obstacles, so what patterns do you notice come up when you are thinking about goals or when you are feeling discomfort? What are your tendencies to do? Are you a person who Doesn't do anything for days on end, like helping you recognize those things upfront so that again, you can make a contingency plan?

You can, you know that this is going to happen and this is what you're going to do when you recognize that thing comes up. So that's the first, the first A, the second A is assessed, and that is, Thinking about the gap between where you are and where you're trying to be, then I think these are these first two steps.

Happy before you even really get into the goal-setting piece, like breaking the goal down because you need to, again, be realistic about your time, your resources, and what you have in place. So assessing is really thinking about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, like a SWOT analysis that you would do for a business.

You can do them for your goals.  And also your resources. What resources do you have? Do you have financial resources? Do you have time or resources? Are there certain skills that you need to be thinking about? It's just, again, trying to help you set goals that are rooted in reality that work for you and work for your life.

The third A is act, and that is to create an action plan. So taking that goal, breaking it down into small steps, and starting to take the first steps towards that goal. The fourth, A is advance, and advance is all about. Execution and keeping the momentum. So we're talking about strategies for navigating procrastination.

We're talking about the importance of maintaining momentum, taking these small steps, and consistency. So all the things in that realm, celebrating. I, I, we often don't celebrate enough. And I think we should be celebrating every little step that we make, but we wait to celebrate these big milestones or these big things.

No, you get to celebrate the entire journey. And so that's what Advance is about. So really just helping you stay consistent, keep the momentum, keep going. And then the final A is adapt. And adapt is about. Tracking progress and making adjustments if you need to, because no matter how well we plan things come up, things go off the rails, you might need to course correct and it's about.

Building resilience and being flexible and taking the feedback that you're getting as you're taking these steps and making adjustments to your plan as you need to. Is this goal just completely off the rails? How do we get back on track? Or what happens when we get to a point where we realize, you know, maybe this path isn't going as well as we thought, and I don't want to do this anymore, or I need to make a big adjustment.

That's time for reflecting and making those changes there.

Applying the Five A's Framework in Real Life: Personal Examples

Carly: I love it. Can you share some examples of how you've used this in your own life?

Monique: Yeah. Every time I do something big, if you read my book, I talk about the pressures of writing a book and how I had just all of these fears around like the end of the book.

I wasn't even three chapters in, but I was already thinking about What I was going to do when I got a one-star Amazon review. I'm going to be devastated and this is not going to be a New York Times bestseller. And can I even write a book that's going to rival Maya Angelou, who's one of my favorite writers And I had to take the tiny action approach to writing the book.

So thinking about a book in small pieces instead of a whole book. Because every time I would think, oh man, I need to write all of chapter two. I would spend weeks stuck trying to write chapter two versus saying, Okay, so chapter two has five sections.  There are five main points I want to make in chapter two.

Great. For the first section of chapter two, can we just write that in one sitting, or can we just focus on that? For this week, we're just going to write the first section of chapter two, and then when I get that. I would just move on to the next section, and that's why there are a lot of section breaks in my book because that's really how I approached it.

It became so much less overwhelming when I focused on those small steps and being aware of where I was getting stuck. So I was getting stuck trying to think about the entirety of the book and all these future things. So it was a lot easier to say, you know what, don't even think about that. We're just writing section two of chapter two, and that's all you can think about.

That's the only thing you can do. And when there came times where maybe I got further along and I realized some things weren't working, then it allowed me to say, okay, here's what you have at play. We need to fix some things. We need to pivot, we need to make changes. I kept a dump file, which basically I didn't delete anything.

I just cut things out of the manuscript and put it into another document. So I'd still have those words in case I needed it later. Yep. So that worked there. I did a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. It took me two years to work up the courage to do that.

Carly: Aww, that's awesome.

Monique: It was, it was a lot. Yeah. And I had a lot of fears around asking people for money because Oh my gosh.

What is more taboo than that, than asking people for money? But the way that I approached that was one, realizing that asking people for money was to hang up. So I needed to do some work around like, why was that a block and  I do this thing called fear mapping. So it's kind of like a mind map but for fear.

So you like to put your fear in the center. Draw a bubble around it and you draw a branch off and then you say or no, you don't put your fear, you put your goal in the center and then you draw a bubble branch off. And then from there, you write what the fear is attached to. So the whole thing about asking people for money and then you need to dispute that claim.

I'm not asking people for money. I'm asking people to support this project and they're not doing it for free. Because if we meet our goal, I'm going to send them a planner. So I'm not just asking them for money, I'm going to give them something in return for this money.  So approaching it like that and realizing, okay, that was the hangup.

And then coming up with a plan for how I'm going to do this. So I took all of my friends from Facebook, took all their names, and put it into a spreadsheet. And I had a goal that each day I had to do 10 people from that list. And I had a little script with a little Shareable thing that they could send.

Because I had either I want you to back the campaign and if you don't want to do that, I would love it if you just shared it on your Facebook page.  And I made it super simple so that they can click it. So things like that, like thinking about the entirety of the process beyond just, I have a goal, I set it, I broke it down into small steps.

But what are we doing again, using our guardrails and, and thinking about future Monique and the Monique of today is being a scary bitch, but future Monique, wants to be brave and do all of these things. So how do we support that?

Carly: I love it so much. I think it's so super helpful to hear how you've taken this and how you've broken things down in your own life and how you've pinpointed where you could potentially get stuck or where you did get stuck and kind of working through that.

There's so much of that. That can be applied to any project that you're doing. That's fantastic. 

Aiming for Positive Change: One Key Goal for Impact

Okay, this question feels kind of out of left field but as I was preparing for this, and as I've been reading your book, I wanted to know from you if you had to pick one goal regarding the change that it would bring to the lives of others through your work, what would that be?

Monique:  My ultimate goal for my work is to help people see greater possibilities. That's, that's like driving, that's my mission behind everything that I do for Take Tiny Action. It's a lofty goal in the sense that it doesn't always feel tangible. It's like one of those intangible goals, but I believe that if I show up, And the fullness of myself.

I show people that I'm able to do these things and it looks fancy. Now I can travel and, you know, I have a cute business, but it's not always been that fancy. It's taken a lot of work. It's taken discipline, it's taken learning how to navigate my finances better, and teaching myself things that I didn't learn as a child.

There is no grandfather or dad's bankrolling this. I have a husband that bankrolls some of this.  But outside of that, like it's, it's all just driven on like my own ambition and my desires. And so for me, the work that I do, I want to show people that there's more that you can do and you don't just have to be a wife and a mother, or you don't just have to be like a dad and a breadwinner. You can do a lot of things. You can be a scrapbooker, you can be a podcaster. You can be a world traveler, you can be a gardener, like whatever you desire. I just want people to see the limits that society places on what we can and should be.

You don't have to be any of those things. You can be what you want.

Unforgettable Moments from an Italian Getaway: Top 3 Favorites

Carly: Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. Okay, you touched on travel for a second, and this is a personal question, but as you know, I stalk you on Instagram, and I know that you recently went on an amazing trip to Italy that was just glorious.

And so I wanted to know your top three favorite moments, either sites, experiences, or food.

Monique: Okay. So. This one is my favorite moment just because of how hilarious it was, not because it was one of my favorite things. It was one of my favorite things to laugh at. I still laugh to this day.

I feel as if, well, I didn't know this, but I spent time in Florence and Tuscany and apparently in those areas, Beef is a really big part of the cuisine, which is fine. I'm an eater. But I was expecting more pasta and there just was not the level of pasta I felt was acceptable as an American going to Italy for the first time.

It wasn't that much pasta. I wanted to be like pasta'd out. When I came home, I wanted to be so sick of pasta and, and I don't feel like I got enough. But the first memorable thing is the food. So, I had beef tartare for the first time. I don't know if you know that it is, but it's basically raw mixed beef. They don't cook it. They season it, somehow the first time that I had it, and Okay. I'm a picky eater, but when I go to things, I try to be brave and practice micro courage by agreeing to eat one or two bites of things. Amazing to try it. So yeah, this was a day where we didn't get, say over the dinner menu.

They were just like, it's a five-course meal, and it started with beef tartare. It was really finely minced, kind of like ahi tuna. It was on the sauce and I had two bites. It wasn't the worst thing that I ate, but it wasn't something I wanted to eat a lot more of. Fast forward to a few days later when we were once again having a set menu dinner and the chef brought out beef tartar that looked like a quarter-pound raw hamburger patty.

Like literally somebody took it out of the packet. The meat section of the grocery store. It was so much, and I was just like, I didn't even let them put it on the table. I was like, no, just I'm not going to eat it. Take it back. But they were so concerned that there was not going to be enough food for us, bougie Americans.

'cause they also had rabbit on the dinner menu and like a duck that our host was like, I was like, if you put it on the grill and put some cheese on it, I will eat it. And they were like, seriously? And I was like, no, I'm serious. And so they brought me back my beef tartar as a burger bunless hamburger.

And I posted it on Instagram, but I don't think I've gotten more engagement than I did that day with the before and the after. So that's my favorite food experience because I know in his mind he was like, these Americans psycho. 'cause serious to be aly supposed fancy dinner.

Carly: He wasn't there the first day. You're like, I did try it. I did. I did. I did try it. I did try it.

 To your point, I was also surprised by the amount of Rustic stew I was having.

Monique: I just really thought it was going to be spaghetti and fettuccine and lasagna and tortellini until I couldn't

I can see it wasn't that, and I don't know if they just lied to us, if we just, I don't know where that got lost in translation, but it was

Carly: Just like different regions that we weren't at. Maybe the Olive Garden didn't help. They just perpetuate a stereotype.

Monique: They probably did. So that was my first one.

As far as sites go, going to the Uffizi Gallery, which is a big art museum in Florence, was amazing. Also exhausting. It is. A mad house in there. There'd be so many people going through there, but this was my first time. It wasn't my first time in Europe, but my first time going to a European art gallery with artwork that I had seen in my textbooks all my life.

So I saw Works by da Vinci and Michelangelo, and Botticelli, like things that I have literally seen and I was amazed. One of my favorite things was to see the birth of Venus. Yes. Painting in person. That was amazing. I got to see this really beautiful work by Michelangelo. Which I hear is like one of the, one of the only surviving, I think paintings like that.

I can't remember the style, but it was, it was beautiful. He did this. I mean, you have to see it. I'll tell you what it is so I can send you a link so you can put it in the show notes. It's even in person, but I like the way he did the light and the shading, it was just amazing.

So, that experience was something I was excited about. And then I think my third Best experience was another food-related one. But one night we had a free dinner. I was there as a mastermind with six other women. And one night we had a free dinner and like four of us went to a Chinese restaurant.

And had so much Chinese food and we just sat and talked and like we ordered so many noodle dishes and the people just kept looking seriously. And we were just running it back, bring that again. And we ate so much food and it was just such a beautiful community and like a great time and conversation.

Carly: Oh, that's lovely. I was telling my husband recently about this dinner that I had once when I was in France with some friends and yeah, we went to Chinese food one night and it was just absolutely lovely. And that's when I tried frog legs for the first time. And, and I was, it was funny 'cause someone had asked me like, oh, did you try Frog Legs when you were in France?

I was like, I did, but we weren't at a French restaurant. We were at a Chinese restaurant and Yeah. I'm so happy for you. Your trip looked amazing. Florence I think is one of the most underrated cities in the world, and your photo shoot also was just chef's kiss.

I'm so happy that you posted some behind-the-scenes on that because I was obsessed.

Monique: I just got, well, I got the rest of those photos and I haven't posted them. I need to do better.

Carly: It's not better or worse. You, you have them, you'll drop them as you see fit and I'll just gobble 'em up as they come. So yeah, if you guys don't follow Monique, you need to know because her feed is hugely inspiring.

But also then you get beautiful snippets of things like trips in Italy and it was just lovely.

Discovering the Take Tiny Actions Quiz: A Quick Overview

Carly: Okay, so please tell us about your Take Tiny Actions quiz, which we will absolutely have in the show notes too, and we want encourage you to, to take that. But tell us about it.

Monique: Oh, so it is to discover what kind of tiny action taker or what kind of action taker you are.

I like to filter everything through the lens of a tiny action taker, but it's just what kind of action taker you are. So I've started recognizing that there are three types of people when it comes to taking action, and also when it comes to risk tolerance. So there is the fearful Spectator, so that's the person that sits on the sidelines and is a little bit.

More reserved, and hesitant to take action. There is the cautious player, that is a person who wants to kind of calculate the risk and plan it out and kind of figure out the lay of the land before they make the next move. And then you have the bold action taker and that person is I'm doing it.

I'm doing it now. Let's go. And the quiz helps you figure out who, which one of those. There's a really quick few questions and then it helps you by telling you about your strengths and weaknesses in each of those things. Even bold action-takers, do have weaknesses like impulsiveness, maybe not thinking ahead, and just kind of jumping out there, burning themselves out.

That's me, and then it just offers you a really quick activity that you can do that plays to your strengths.

Carly: Amazing. I did take the quiz. I got the bold action taker, and it was like a little, little window into my soul for better or for worse. So, yeah. Highly recommend it. Yes. Well, Monique, do you have, as we wrap up here, do you have any final thoughts that you would like to leave with folks?

Final Thoughts with Monique

Monique:  Take tiny action. Take tiny actions Daily. But no. So my final thoughts are do not let society pressure you into being a big leaper. If you're not a big leaper. I think that is perfectly fine to not want to leap into oblivion for every single thing that you do. Admittedly, tiny actions on the surface don't seem sexy because the media is not necessarily championing the tiny action taker.

We don't see a lot of that in the press. We're always thinking about the overnight success and the Mark Zuckerbergs and who has the most and who stripped their entire cabinet of all the junk food and just went out and started training for a marathon the next day. And while that sounds great.

That is the path to overcoming burnout stress, and a lot of fear and resistance. It's so much easier if you stop trying to take action from that prominent picture place that you want to be. And focus on the small steps that you can do today, that you can do tomorrow, that you can do next week, and that you can do a month from now.

And over time, those tiny actions do compound and you get really amazing results.

Carly: I love it so much. I know that Brittany and I were just talking about it the other week for our anniversary episode, but everything, you know, even from a business perspective, anything that we've done with, like the podcast, it all starts with one listener, or your email list starts with one person.

Everything that you do can start as a teeny tiny little thing and just grow over time. And I think that a lot of times those tiny actions are underrated. And I say that in all capitals with a bunch of underlines and then some stamps and stars around it. So I love the work that you do. I am a huge fan.

I think it's wildly important for all aspects of our lives, and thank you so much for being here today.

Monique: Thank you so much for having me. Where can folks find you, Monique? Best place to find me. The hub of everything that I do is at taketinyaction.com. You can find all my stuff, but if you want to follow me online, Instagram is probably the best place.

I do have a Take Tiny Action Instagram, but I'm more active on my profile, which is Monique e Malcolm. It's two E's, so Monique e Malcolm. There'll be links in the show notes, but that's where you can find me. Love it. If you want to talk about dreams and goals and taking tiny actions or food or travel.

Carly: I can tell you from experience, that she's very kind in the dms. Because yeah, I've been responding to a bunch of her beautiful stories. Thank you again for being here. All of the links that we mentioned will absolutely be in the show notes, and I'll be sure to follow up with you about the picture to share as well from the gallery.

And yeah, be sure to take the quiz. Follow Monique. And highly recommend her book as well. Thank you again, Monique, for being here. I appreciate you.

Monique: Thank you.

We would love to make sure that your questions are answered for a question of the week or a future episode. So we love to hear from you. DM (on Instagram) or you can always email me, carly@tidyrevival.com. We love hearing from you. We love hearing your thoughts about the pod, and thank you so much for hanging out.

If you wanna learn more about how I can help you, feel free to head over to tidyrevival.com to learn how I work with people one-on-one or in our private community. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe so you'll always have access to the latest episode.

We would also love to hear your takeaways. Feel free to tag us on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. The Tidy Revival podcast is written and hosted by me, Carly Adams, and edited by Brittany McLean. Title Song Maverick is by Dresden The Flamingo.

and until next time, remember that…

 
 
 

Links mentioned in this episode

 
 
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