Bearing It All EP 7: Perfectionism, Power & Presence with Kadena Tate

Kate Ginsberg
Hi, y'all. I am Kate Ginsberg. Thank you so much for joining us for Bearing It All, the podcast where entrepreneurs and business owners discuss the highs, lows, tumbles, and triumphs of building a business. If you're here for stories that inspire and keep it real, you're in the right place. On today's episode, I'm talking with Kadena Tate, founder of 50 Shades of Paid. Kadena is a highly sought after speaker, business coach, revenue strategist and business model designer.

Kadena, I am so excited to have you here today. Welcome and tell us a bit about your history and what led you to this point in your entrepreneurial journey.

Kadena Tate
Okay, thank you so much for having me. So what led me to this point? I was tired of being an "A student" who didn't understand money. So I had to study business model design and revenue strategy so that I could figure it out. And what I realized was at the end of the day, the way that we structure a business,

is how we make the money, right? Some businesses are simply not set up to scale. So for example, I started in coaching. Well, if you're coaching one-to-one, you can't really scale that. You have to put systems in place to make it work. So ⁓ I was tired of pulling it. How do they say? Pull it out the mud every time. So that's how I got here.

Kate Ginsberg
hours.

Okay, very good. Kadena, you are actually our coach. We met through the 10 KSB program up in Dallas and your modules that we did were so incredibly impactful. And when we sat together at lunch one day, I knew at that point that we needed to work together. So I am so thrilled to have you here. Just, I wish I could concisely explain to our listeners, like,

how incredibly valuable your knowledge is and the way that you share knowledge freely. You don't gatekeep. like, especially women business owners that do that, that are bringing other business owners along, like I love everything about that. And so thank you, thank you for being here today. Let's jump right into our question.

I need you to pick a number one through 10. Most commonly picked number, think one. ⁓

Kadena Tate
7.

Kate Ginsberg
Yeah.

Three, four, five, six, seven. ⁓ I am excited to hear your answer to this one. This is gonna be a good one for us. If you could speak to yourself on the day you decided to start your business, what would you say? What advice or reassurance would you give?

Kadena Tate
Okay.

There will definitely be fumbles and tumbles, but you will meet yourself at every step along the way, both the lazy you, right? And the you that spins into perfectionism, people pleasing and proving. But at the end of the day, if you relax and take a deep breath and learn how to trust yourself, you'll be just fine. You'll be just fine. Yeah, that's what I would say.

Kate Ginsberg
That is some

Phenomenal advice. Tell us how you come to that bit of advice for past Kadena.

Kadena Tate
I think that for such a long time I was stressing myself out and what I realized was that, and I don't mean this in any type of a disrespectful way, but I was spending so hard into perfectionism that I became like a college professor talking to kindergarteners and I basically didn't relate to my clients. I was overwhelming them and overburdening them and I didn't know that the perfectionism in me

was creating self doubt in them. So once I started just being present and noticing and like slowing things down, because I had this whole go big or go home, you know, I'm prior military. So not only am I prior active duty Air Force, I also grew up in the house with a man who was a Marine first and then he was in the Air Force. So I was very militant and very rigid in my thinking.

And it just got to a point where it's like, that's not working. And the other thing that I noticed was...

What I really like if I told the truth, which wasn't in the rhythm of how businesses run, I wanted to be a teacher of teachers and a leader of leaders. In other words, I didn't want to be the teacher and the person be the student. I wanted to create a space where the person could rise up into the fullness of who they were. And that was like really hard because that's not how we're socialized, right? We're socialized.

one person has to be the leader and the other person has to be the followers. And we even hear stuff like too many chiefs, know, not enough Indians, right? We have all these statements that kind of keep people constricted, you know? And so I just gave myself permission to redefine what female business owner meant. And that doesn't always mean that you're in some type of...

service, over giving capacity where you're under earning, you know what I mean? And, and over delivering. Yeah. So that's how I got here.

Kate Ginsberg
I am a recovering perfectionist. I was the gifted kid with undiagnosed ADHD. And so all of a sudden not performing absolutely perfectly all the time. Like that's a devastating experience for so many women where we feel like we're letting people down or we get...

Kadena Tate
Yep.

Kate Ginsberg
analysis paralysis where, you know, if we can't do it perfectly, we don't do it at all. And I think that's one of the things that makes you such an effective coach is not feeding into that perfectionist narrative and not continuing, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought, like you're not ever, you're very realistic in how you interact with your coaching clients and

Kadena Tate
Absolutely.

Kate Ginsberg
really push us as clients, as friends, honestly, to not get stuck in, like being aware of the risk, but not getting stuck on the risks and pushing.

Kadena Tate
Ooh,

that's really interesting because I have a really, really good friend who's an embodiment guide. And one of the things that she told me years ago, you know, that I thought I understood it when she said it, but I really didn't. And I didn't realize this actually until like two years ago. She said to me, you're very decisive woman and most women are trained to be indecisive.

And so when a woman comes to a crossroad of her life and she has to make a decision, do I go to the left? Do I go straight? Or do I go to the right? She pauses and hesitates because of her relationship with uncertainty. Whereas you just look and say, I'm gonna go this way. And then if it doesn't work out, you just turn around and go another way. But other people, don't.

necessarily feel comfortable doing that and what you've got to do is you've got to allow people the opportunity to see what lies behind all three doors and because you are a creative visionary you can kind of see if you go this way you can expect this this way you can expect that and that kind of helps people and i thought i understood what she meant i thought i did after working with a whole bunch of different people right

but I didn't really understand how deeply ingrained the fear is around not just the fear of failure, but the fear of success.

Kadena Tate
Right? Because I had a client who five x'd income in two years and she was like unraveling. And when I saw that, I realized, wait a minute, I have a responsibility, not just as a revenue strategist to help you make money, right? But I also need to study stuff like your nervous system so that I can have a really honest conversation about

who you are, for example, at $100,000 a year and who you are at $100,000 a month, baby, those are two different versions of you. And we have to tell the truth about what's our relationship with asking, what's our relationship with receiving, You know, what's our relationship with showing up and telling the truth about how we feel. You know or having to...

Kate Ginsberg
Thank

Kadena Tate
like terminate a client or not even so dramatic as terminate a client but tell a client or an employee hey you're not really doing a good job and this is not going to work that can be very uncomfortable for women.

Kate Ginsberg
It's so hard where ⁓ I was raised in the Midwest. I am Midwest nice. And I'm just now in my 40s unraveling all of that, biting my tongue and swallowing things down and just pushing through because that's what nice girls do. and it's not...

it's not nice or kind to anybody else in my business to let relationships continue for too long, whether it's with a client or whether it's with another employee. And I think there's that tendency to hang on to things until they're so bad that like recovering from that and the mental anguish all the way along that journey. And then also after the thing is done and

Why did I let this go for so long? It's impacting me, it's impacting my family, it's impacting our company culture, it's impacting, you know, like, and that lens, which you have helped us with in coaching sessions, has made it far easier to make those decisions and execute on them quickly, which I think is something that a lot of particularly women business owners struggle with.

Kadena Tate
I agree. Well, we're socialized that way. I mean, I'm from New Orleans, so I'm Southern girl nice, right? And so you have all these different versions of what it means to be a nice woman. And quite frankly, it directly conflicts with customer service protocols, you know, and your user experience. Because if you are falling on your own sword just to make somebody else comfortable and you're doing all the things, you know, and let's keep it 100.

When you're in perfectionism energy, you are also an overgiving energy because you keep tweaking the thing to make it right for the person and you assume also a false sense of responsibility for that person's success. Whether this is employee or client, right? You start stepping in and doing things without setting clear boundaries and without getting really clear about like, how are we working together in reciprocity to build the bigger thing?

like

when I was here with you and Heather, one of the things that I had to tell my employees is, listen, we're standing on the mountaintop, on the same mountaintop, facing in the same direction, looking out over the horizon at the same goal. And if we're not looking at the same goal and we're not all doing what we need to do, then we don't need to be together. Because if you're turned around, right, looking in another direction saying, I'm going over here, this is my business, right, you're derailing. ⁓

the ultimate vision, right? Which is to help women become multimillionaires so that we can rise out of poverty. Because, and I'm talking not just physical poverty, because there's poverty of the mind, poverty comes in many, many forms. And so I just feel like at some point we have to tell each other the truth that the things that we have learned, we have to unlearn.

And then I want to speak to something that you said earlier. I read this book called Coming Home to Myself by Marion Woodman. And in that book, there was a sentence that said, perfection r*s the soul. I remember when I first read that, it punched me in the chest because I was deep.

Kate Ginsberg
you

Kadena Tate
in my perfectionism at that season of my life. And then the other thing that she said in that book is that, which is the thing that I said earlier, which is when you have perfectionism, you actually create low self-esteem in other people because nothing's right. And there's, you know,

It's kind of like the, I forgot the, the name of the philosophy is Wabi Sabi, and it's that art of impermanence that there's no such thing. If you look at nature, it's lavish in its abundance, but it's not perfection. No two leaves are alike. So where do we get this idea that everything has to be?

cookie cutter the same. Like we're not even honoring the rhythms of the earth and of nature when we show up like that. So just coming along the way, you know, I mean, I wish I could say to you that I learned all these lessons like before I turned 30. No, I'm 60, you know, and it has taken me like it's like an onion that's unraveling and it keeps unraveling and I see these sides of myself and I'm like, I need to let that go.

That's disempowering, not just to me, but to the people around me.

Kate Ginsberg
So I just had an analogy pop into my head as you said that. And it's like a rose opening up. We start as the bud, know what's going on. And as it opens, and the outer petals start to fall off the beliefs of your 20s. what I'm really working on right now is my money mindset, because I was raised very poor. And...

getting out of that scarcity mindset has been so hard and it's so uncomfortable for me to spend money, know, even even business money investing in marketing and that sort of thing. It's so hard for me not to

cling to it and especially the last year or so, I can feel those money petals opening up and starting to drop off, which is so freeing. And you don't get to the full beauty of the rose until it's opened up and those outer petals that did the work in the beginning can start to drop off. I don't know why that just came to me, but I'm so glad it did.

Kadena Tate
Yes.

Kate Ginsberg
No, I think that's a beautiful illustration. Here's what I'll say as it relates to the money mindset. I think a lot of people, they act like they just arrived at a place where they felt worthy and deserving. And I don't believe that because like I said, I'm 60. There are beliefs that I had in my 20s that obviously I let go of, right? But with every new level,

there's another set of beliefs that you don't even know that you have that appear. So I'll give you a quick example so you know what I mean. So when I made 50,000, I couldn't wait to make 100,000 because I thought then I can buy the things that I want. When I got to 100,000,

I realized, oh my God, I need staff. I'm in every box of my organizational chart. I have got to hire people. I need more money. I thought I needed 250,000 to be able to pay three people. This is what I thought. I thought, if I make 250,000, but guess what? The 250,000 didn't include me.

and it didn't include my goals. It just included the people. So it still wasn't enough money. So then I had to rearrange things. And what I realized is that I had this belief that I needed to adjust. the belief was that, well, the primary belief is there's three levels. There's not enough, there's just enough, and there's more than enough. I was always operating in the land of just enough, which by the way, always became not enough, right? So I did that until

until I got to half a million.

When I got to half a million, then I started noticing, wow, people expect you to be like their loan officer. You you're like the first bank of your family, all these different people need money for different things. And you're like, I need this money for my business. I'm not out here like driving, Like a $100,000 car and living in a million dollar house. I'm living very modestly. I'm doing these things. And this business is consuming huge amounts of money and energy.

time. So now I need to adjust. Then you cross over the million dollar mark and then it becomes, am I safe with this money?

Kadena Tate
Right? Because there's so many channels in this society of scams, not just like what we see on the news with hackers and identity thieves, but insider threats, even inside of your business where, you know, like you hear the stories of people's attorneys, right? Or their accountants running off with the money. So you have all this stuff that's constantly showing up with money. So it's like, if you're not, everybody says, well, the answer is financial literacy.

It's deeper than financial literacy. Yes. Do you need to be financially literate? Yes. But you also, your nervous system needs to be attuned to the safety of money. Your nervous system needs to be attuned to setting boundaries. Your nervous system needs to be attuned to no longer spinning into like, I don't really deserve it. So I'm going try to give it all away, right? Through my, I call the art of do goodery. You know, it's like when you say to somebody,

Hey, if you won the lottery, what's the first thing you would do? And they list all these charities. And then you say, what would you do for yourself? like mm

i don't know So it's like reframing that relationship. So I've had to unlearn and learn and then unlearn again several, I don't think it ever goes away, right? And I also think that if you don't, if you were not born into a place where money was available for everything that you needed, when things show up,

I do think that scarcity rises and then you have to remind yourself that's a scarcity based thought. That no longer serves me. I now have a new experience of something, but you can still freak out. when, listen, when the stock market crashed and I lost a lot of money, Kate, I was like, Wait a minute.

I need a different plan. And that's when I moved to real estate as an investment because I said, you know what, everybody needs a house. But this stock market, this is kind of like being at the casino, which is stressing me out. you know, we all like, I feel like we don't tell the truth about how everything is not for everybody. Do you know what I mean? In terms of investment vehicles and in terms of how you handle money. And I just think, I just think it's going to be with us until.

we pass away or make a transition however you want to describe that. But I think it changes and you grow and evolve and you let go of things. But then there's like a new layer because like just quick side note, right? So Jeff Bezos just got married and everybody was talking about how much money he spent on his wedding. And they were talking about how it wasn't even beautiful. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And also it was his money, right? So we have all these ideas about how people should be spending their money in the way that is alignment in align with our values, but we forget we will face that same judgment.

Should our businesses grow into that same big, huge container, the same criticisms will be made. Why are you making so much money, but your employees aren't? It's like there's always going to be something that's going to bump up against your money mindset, your money beliefs, your money habits. And then how do you shift that? And how do you change that so that you're in alignment with your own beliefs and your own values and not swaying?

Kate Ginsberg
right.

Kadena Tate
to

the moods of what's going on around us. I hope that makes sense.

Kate Ginsberg
Right.

It does. It's such a weird time to be alive and owning a business at this point. Like things are just changing so fast. And it's really easy to get caught up in that and feel like you've got financial whiplash from trying to plan so well and then, ⁓ something else has happened in the world and now everything is uncertain again. It's it's bananas to try to keep up with it all.

Kadena Tate
Yeah.

Yes.

Kate Ginsberg
you know, and continue to make constant risk assessments and adjustments based on things that are changing. And sometimes the best you can do is just stay the course and, you know, wait for the water to settle again and then, you know, reassess the risk. ⁓ Is there any closing thoughts that you'd like to share with our listeners today?

Kadena Tate
Exactly.

I think the best advice that I would give to anyone is the statement that you hear me say all the time, and that is that authenticity has no competition. I think too many people...

The reason that they can't get to where they're trying to get to in life is because of the thing that we were taught in second grade, which is the law of compare and contrast. I think we're looking outside of ourselves for affirmation, validation, and confirmation of worth, instead of looking within, defining like, this is who I am, this is what I'm good at, and then aligning your life around that, right? Because I think we wouldn't have the relationship if we had

The relationship that we have, if there wasn't a part of you who was really, really clear about, this is who I am, this is the mission of Queen of To Do, this is the legacy that I want to leave, and can you help me refine it? And also at the same time, can we let go of all the things that are keeping us from the vision that we set for ourselves? So that's the advice that I would give.

Kate Ginsberg
Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. Are there any socials you'd like our listeners to follow you on?

Kadena Tate
Yeah, LinkedIn, Kadena Tate, and Instagram, Kadena Tate.

Kate Ginsberg
Okay, fantastic. We'll get those dropped in our show notes. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kadena. Again, this was Bearing It All with Kate and Kadena today. Thank you for listening and we hope you join us next time.

Kadena Tate
Thank you.