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EPISODE #71

3 Personal & Professional Lessons I Learned in 2025

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In this deeply personal and honest episode, Joanna shares three hard-earned personal and professional lessons from 2025—a year marked by profound grief, meaningful growth, business challenges, and unexpected beauty.

From navigating the loss of her mother, to making one of the biggest business mistakes of her 25-year career, to radically shifting how she holds herself during launches, Joanna reflects on what it truly means to be human, resilient, supported, and wise.

This episode is a gentle but powerful invitation to slow down, reflect, and integrate what life has been teaching you, especially through the harder moments. While none of these lessons are “new,” they are lessons Joanna had to fully metabolize in her bones—and her hope is that you’ll feel something click more deeply for you, too.

If 2025 stretched you, cracked you open, or taught you things you didn’t ask to learn—but needed—this episode is for you.

This Episode Is For You If:

✔️ You’ve had a hard or complex year and want to make meaning from it

✔️ You’re an entrepreneur who struggles with launches, uncertainty, or self-pressure

✔️ You’re learning how to receive support without guilt

✔️ You value depth, honesty, and wisdom earned through lived experience

✔️ You want to enter the new year with more self-trust, compassion, and perspective


Loved This Episode?

💌 Email Joanna:

If this episode resonated with you, Joanna would truly love to hear from you.

Email info@applieddepthinstitute.com and share what stood out—and what your 2025 lessons were. She reads and responds personally.

📣 Share the Podcast:

If this episode (or the podcast in general) has supported you, please share it with a friend, colleague, or community. Word-of-mouth helps spread the mission of creating more depth, integrity, and humanity in coaching and leadership.

View the Transcript Here

Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
00:00:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
00:00:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
00:00:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
00:00:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s get started.
00:01:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Welcome back to the Coaching Revolution Podcast.
00:01:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
In today’s episode, I’m going to share and break down three really big and important lessons that I learned in 2025.
00:01:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Lessons that I learned and earned mostly because of some really tough things and disappointments that happened over this last year.
00:01:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s because so many beautiful lessons in life come from the harder moments, if you’re willing to be aware and intentional about it all.
00:01:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And these are also lessons that I think you’ll really appreciate.
00:01:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And my hope is that you’re going to learn a lot for yourself from these lessons that I’ve learned.
00:01:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is the first new episode that I’m recording in the new year in 2026.
00:01:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it’s also the first episode of the 2026 season of the Coaching Revolution podcast.
00:02:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I hope that you had a really beautiful and meaningful and restful holiday season over these last weeks.
00:02:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I am so grateful that you’re back here in the new year with me.
00:02:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t take it for granted, not even for one moment, that you are devoting your precious time and energy to this podcast.
00:02:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It means so, much to me.
00:02:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thank you.
00:02:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m coming back to you and the podcast excited and refreshed.
00:02:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I really needed the five or six weeks that I took off from podcast creation.
00:02:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I also needed the couple of weeks inside of those five or six weeks that I took off from work completely.
00:02:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I took off from being online completely.
00:02:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will tell you that
00:02:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
By the time the beginning of December 2025 rolled around last month, I was feeling pretty tired.
00:03:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
And thankfully now I am returning back to the podcast with more energy and more creativity.
00:03:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I really can’t wait to share today’s episode with you.
00:03:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s a personal one.
00:03:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
And as I said, it’s about some of the things that unfolded and unfurled for me personally and professionally in 2025 and what I learned from them.
00:03:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And as always, this episode, I’m being very real and honest, even about the really tough things.
00:03:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And let me tell you, there were a lot of tough moments.
00:03:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
in 2025.
00:03:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
And of course, the biggest one was my mother dying last April.
00:03:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
But even aside from how big that has been, there have also been quite a few other tough moments in 2025.
00:04:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Moments where I felt like I was really on the struggle bus.
00:04:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
Moments of struggle as a mother, moments of struggle as a daughter and as a sister, moments of struggle as a friend, moments of struggle as an entrepreneur, and lots of internal struggle with myself too.
00:04:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
There were a lot of doozies last year.
00:04:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And doozies specifically related to me and my life, but also, of course, 2025 was a hard time in the collective, in the world.
00:04:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
Lots of heartache.
00:04:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t know about you, but for me, I cried or raged while reading the news a lot of times.
00:05:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
So
00:05:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
If 2025 for you had a lot of notable tough moments, whether they were personal or in the collective, what was happening in current events, whatever it is, please know you are not alone.
00:05:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
One thing that I’ve come to count on is that life isn’t only the happy and the joyous, but it’s also the grief and the messy.
00:05:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And to be human is to experience all of it.
00:05:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
The grief in life is almost always right there on top of the joy, which is always right there on top of the grief, which is always right there on top of the joy and so on and so forth.
00:05:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is all of the things.
00:06:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
That being said,
00:06:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
2025 also for me had a lot of not just tough moments, but a lot of joy and beauty and meaning inside of all of it.
00:06:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
2025 was the year that we adopted Willa.
00:06:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
our doggy.
00:06:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
We adopted her right before she turned 8 years old.
00:06:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think she’s a pit bull and lab mix.
00:06:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s some kind of mix.
00:06:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m not exactly sure what.
00:06:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
But she is exactly what I wanted.
00:06:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
She is such a big ball of love and affection.
00:06:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And now that Yael, my younger daughter, is just about a tween, she’s going to be 12 in April.
00:06:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And she’s not always wanting to cuddle with me anymore.
00:06:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
Willa, our dog, has been exactly what I’ve needed.
00:07:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
2025 was also the year that Penina, my older daughter, got into her first choice of college.
00:07:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I am beaming with pride and excitement for her, along with a good dose of my grieving mama heart, because I’m going to have to let her go come this August.
00:07:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
In 2025, I also reached most of my business goals, which I feel really proud of considering how the industry has been.
00:07:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And by the way, just because I reached most of my business goals, that doesn’t mean that all of it was unicorns and roses on the business front.
00:07:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m going to be sharing some of what didn’t go so well in just a few minutes as part of some of the lessons.
00:07:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
The other really great thing about 2025 for me was that I had a lot of social time with a lot of different friends and that brought me so much joy.
00:08:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Plus, at the end of the year, I finally, finally got to see the redwoods in California.
00:08:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s something that’s been on my bucket list since I’ve been a teenager.
00:08:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
And let me tell you, the redwoods did not disappoint.
00:08:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
They were even more magical than I had imagined.
00:08:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
So while there was a lot of tough in 2025,
00:08:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s also really a lot for me to be grateful for from this last year, even amongst all of the challenges.
00:08:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
So the three lessons that I’m going to share with you today, these are lessons that are really important and meaningful to me.
00:08:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re hard-earned wisdom that I have a feeling are going to serve me for a very long time to come.
00:09:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m sharing them with you because I hope that they’re going to give you inspiration and motivation and maybe even some valuable strategy to take for yourself into this new year.
00:09:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
There have been so, many lessons this last year, probably more than I would even like.
00:09:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
But for today, I picked some of the most salient ones.
00:09:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll just tell you right now, as we get into them, nothing I’m going to share with you on the episode today is completely innovative, exactly.
00:09:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s stuff that I kind of already knew, and it’s stuff that you probably already know as well.
00:09:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
But that being said, it’s also things that
00:09:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
I needed to understand, digest, metabolize, and really get to know on a much, much deeper level.
00:10:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
And these lessons, as I got to understand them on a much deeper level, they got way more profound
00:10:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
and alive for me.
00:10:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I hope that’s what will happen for you as you listen along.
00:10:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
So let’s dive in.
00:10:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Very first lesson.
00:10:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m just going to get into it and say to sum it up, the lesson is cheaper isn’t always better.
00:10:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
So to give you the fuller story on this one, we kind of have to rewind way back to when I was a little girl.
00:10:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m going to start with this.
00:10:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m the daughter of two immigrants who came to this country with nothing but the clothing on their backs.
00:10:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
My mother came to the United States when she was 15 in 1959, and my father came to the States when he was 20.
00:11:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
in 1965.
00:11:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And both of them separately with their parents, they were both only children, when they both came here, they were poor as mice.
00:11:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And like many immigrants who come to this country, neither of them knew English when they arrived here.
00:11:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I will also say to this day, my father’s accent is still so thick that it sounds like he did just arrive.
00:11:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And my mother’s accent was pretty thick too.
00:11:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because my parents are immigrants,
00:11:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
My family did things differently than other families did when I was growing up, and I often felt different from my friends and their families.
00:12:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Different for big things and little things.
00:12:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
Little things like the foods we ate at home.
00:12:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
I actually never once had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich until I was 16 years old and at a friend’s house.
00:12:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Just never, it was not something that my family ate in the house.
00:12:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then I also felt different for my friends and their family for much bigger things.
00:12:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just felt like the way that I moved through the world was different.
00:12:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway, I mention all of this because like many immigrants, my parents also worked very hard to make a life here in the US.
00:12:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I mean, they really worked.
00:12:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And on top of that,
00:12:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
They watched their spending like hawks.
00:13:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
They watched their spending very carefully so that really my sister and I could have a much better life than they had.
00:13:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
My parents were so focused on saving money that they skimped on a lot of things that they deemed unnecessary.
00:13:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
And for me growing up,
00:13:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
looking for bargains, and really only, we only ever spent money on bargains.
00:13:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
This was one of the credos in the household, bargain or bust.
00:13:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And maybe the one exception to this was education.
00:13:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
My parents really, really valued education.
00:13:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
They understood how important it was, and school and education were always top priority.
00:13:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So anyway, until I was in my 20s,
00:13:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
this bargain or bust, this really watching, spending, this looking for the cheapest thing was strongly in effect.
00:14:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
So until I was in my 20s, I mostly wore either hand-me-down clothing or knockoff clothing from brands.
00:14:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was really embarrassing in middle school to show up with knockoff Champion sweatshirts and knockoff KED sneakers.
00:14:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
I felt like everybody knew that I didn’t have the real thing.
00:14:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Another example, my first Barbie doll that I got was also a knockoff.
00:14:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
It wasn’t truly a Barbie doll.
00:14:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I remember being so sad because she definitely looked different than the other Barbie dolls.
00:14:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
when I went away to college and I was living on my own, separate from my parents, I took the bargain mentality with me.
00:14:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
I took that bargain or bust credo with me.
00:14:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I can remember all of the times where I’d be hanging out with friends and notice that they didn’t have to think about
00:15:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
too much if they wanted to buy little luxuries for themselves.
00:15:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even things like a Snapple iced tea, right?
00:15:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
We’d all be on a walk, walking from one part of campus to another.
00:15:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
A friend would get thirsty, they’d stop in a bodega, they’d buy iced tea.
00:15:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Whereas for me, it didn’t matter how thirsty I was, I would not buy the drink at the bodega.
00:15:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
I would wait and I would stay thirsty until I got back to my apartment or my dorm room, and then I’d have some tap water.
00:15:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you know, this was in the late 1990s when I was in college.
00:15:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Snapple was probably less than $2 at the time.
00:15:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
I had the money, but I just wouldn’t spend on it.
00:15:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And as I got older, I did definitely loosen up around the bargain thing a little bit.
00:16:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
I graduated from hand-me-downs and knock-off clothing, started shopping at J.Crew, Anthropologie, though I’d never, ever consider buying anything high fashion.
00:16:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
It wasn’t really even that important to me.
00:16:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
But also,
00:16:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I would never consider buying any article of clothing that wasn’t on sale.
00:16:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
And to this day, and I’m 50 years old now, I am very, very certain that I’ve actually never, ever bought an article of clothing for myself that wasn’t on sale.
00:16:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
I have bought for my kids here and there, but not for me.
00:16:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you know, honestly, I’m pretty proud of that.
00:16:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
because it’s not such a big value of mine to have, highly fashionable clothing.
00:16:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I also don’t buy clothing or really any stuff, objects, things.
00:17:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t buy things very often outside of food and toiletries.
00:17:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I do buy a lot of books, I will say that.
00:17:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
But the not buying a lot of stuff, it’s not only because of
00:17:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
that immigrant bargain and low spending mentality, some of it is because I just don’t believe in buying too much stuff.
00:17:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because I don’t think it’s good for the environment to buy things so much.
00:17:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also, I just can’t stand clutter in my house.
00:17:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway, I diverge.
00:17:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let me get back on track about the cheaper isn’t always better lesson.
00:17:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I promise I am getting to sharing with you a huge business fail that happened around all of this in 2025.
00:17:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
But first, there’s one more background thing to know about how I spend money.
00:18:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
As I’ve gotten older, I definitely now splurge on myself on a few things.
00:18:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ve worked really diligently the last few decades and I’ve been financially successful.
00:18:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so I do kind of force myself sometimes to take more pleasure in the money that I’ve earned and spend it.
00:18:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
So for example, I love, love, love getting massages and really any kind of body work.
00:18:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I do get massages
00:18:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
and body work pretty regularly, a couple times a month.
00:18:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t get them in fancy spa-like places.
00:18:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just go to really, really good practitioners who are very reasonably priced, but I do spend there.
00:18:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
I also value organic food,
00:18:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
and high quality supplements, health and well-being are big priorities for me.
00:19:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so I’ll spend whatever I need to spend on those things.
00:19:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Really, anything where it comes to health, I am going to buy top quality.
00:19:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also, of course, I also know the importance of really stellar and exceptional transformational coaches
00:19:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
and practitioners.
00:19:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I have always, always been very willing to spend on coaches and practitioners, whether it comes to my business, my self-development, et cetera.
00:19:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
Though I will be honest, there are some practitioners out there that charge what I think is astronomical amounts of money, like
00:19:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
really a lot of money.
00:19:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I know I could never bring myself to spend that much.
00:20:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Some of it is that immigrant inside of me for sure, but most of it is just that it seems a bit excessive to me, or I should say excessive for me.
00:20:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
And what I mean by that is I don’t judge other people
00:20:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
if they charge what I sense or what I feel is astronomical.
00:20:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s like different strokes for different folks.
00:20:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s just not my jam.
00:20:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
Not as a consumer and also not as a business owner.
00:20:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ve always kept my pricing on my coaching and my programming much lower than other folks out there who have half as much experience and mastery that I have whose programs aren’t maybe as effective as mine.
00:20:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s just because charging really, really high prices, it just never appealed to me.
00:21:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just never did anything for me.
00:21:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway,
00:21:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
All of that being said, the part of me that is the daughter of poor Schnook immigrants still can be very much alive inside of me.
00:21:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And honestly, because of it, I do still deny myself sometimes reasonable things that I might want, even when I can absolutely afford them.
00:21:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t do this all the time, but it still does come up sometimes.
00:21:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And related to all of this, there is definitely a part of me that still is always looking for a bargain, even though I sometimes know better.
00:21:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even if I know better, sometimes there’s a part of me that still believes that cheaper is better.
00:22:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:22:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
Unfortunately, that part of me, the part of me that’s always looking for cheaper, that’s always looking for a bargain, it led me down a kind of hellacious Rd.
00:22:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
this last year inside of my business when it came to a big project that we were working on inside of the business, a project to refresh
00:22:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
my website and choose a new CRM.
00:22:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
For those of you that don’t know CRM, I don’t even know what it stands for, but it’s the software that sends out emails.
00:22:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
So there were so many lessons for me and my team inside of this website refresh and this shift to
00:22:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
the new CRM.
00:22:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And at some point, I’ve already written about it before.
00:23:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think in the autumn, I sent a newsletter about some of the things, but even more lessons about all of this have surfaced.
00:23:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And hopefully at some point, I’ll do a full podcast episode on everything that I learned through this terrible, terrible technology mishap.
00:23:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I’m not quite ready to do that yet, because the truth is that
00:23:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m still cleaning up the massive, massive mess that I got into.
00:23:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
And not all of the lessons have fully surfaced.
00:23:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I am still kind of raw about all of it.
00:23:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
But for today’s episode, I know that it will be valuable.
00:23:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I want to share this.
00:23:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
I want to share about the cheaper isn’t always better piece.
00:23:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
So this all started, this whole refresh idea, website refresh idea started because I was working with a marketing guy who, the truth is I didn’t really totally trust him in the 1st place.
00:24:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s another lesson here.
00:24:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Listen,
00:24:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
listen to my inner knowing about people.
00:24:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Of course, I know this, but sometimes I forget.
00:24:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway, this guy, this marketing guy recommended that I do a website refresh because my old website didn’t express fully.
00:24:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
the incredible amount of free content that I offer as well as it could.
00:24:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the old website also didn’t easily share information on all of the incredible live events that I offer.
00:24:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
It also just didn’t, it didn’t offer an easy pathway for visitors to really immerse themselves in my universe.
00:24:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
to really get who I am, to learn from all of the free things that I have to share.
00:24:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so this marketing consultant wanted me to change up the website design because while the design was super pretty, I loved that old website design so, so, so, so much.
00:25:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
The truth is that it was overly designed and
00:25:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
overly designed was actually distracting from my actual messaging.
00:25:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
He also wanted me to do things like add upcoming events in various places on the website, since I do so many live events, and because when people are live with me, they really get hooked.
00:25:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
He wanted me to offer more of my free resources.
00:25:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I have all of these free resources, and I wasn’t really sharing about all of them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:25:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
There were a lot of kinds of changes that he suggested I make.
00:25:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I did think that some of his ideas had merit, and I wanted to switch up some of the things on the website.
00:26:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
But
00:26:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because I had never really considered my website to be a major marketing asset in my business, and because I don’t like to spend money, I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money on this project.
00:26:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
My
00:26:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
inner daughter of an immigrant part inside of me completely backed up this idea to not spend too much money on the website refresh and to look for a bargain.
00:26:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
But let me tell you, this, I see now, after so much heartache, this was actually a situation
00:26:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
where cheaper was absolutely the wrong way to go.
00:27:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I hired, because I was looking for a bargain, I hired a graphic designer that I already knew, who I thought she was okay.
00:27:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
I definitely did not think she was spectacular.
00:27:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I hired her because she was way, way cheaper than most other people.
00:27:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m a little embarrassed to share all of this because it really was such a disaster.
00:27:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I will tell you that this cheap graphic designer, along with I also made the mistake of hiring a developer who was cheaper, who turned out to be a dud,
00:27:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
All of these things, they ended up costing me, and I’m not exaggerating right now, they ended up costing me thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars in having to go back and correct all of the mistakes that were made in having to deal with all of the glitches of the final product that just weren’t getting fixed.
00:28:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
in having launches this autumn where not all of the opt-ins were working, where not all of the technology was working, where the checkout pages stopped working at certain points.
00:28:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
It cost me so much money on team hours because of all of the chaos that ensued.
00:28:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
And not to mention part of the fallout of going cheaper, looking for the bargain, has been so many headaches and worries, frustrations.
00:29:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
It has taken so much of my extra time and energy, like really from August
00:29:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
through December, it just took up so much extra time and energy.
00:29:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I know that this is part of what contributed to me just feeling so exhausted by the end of the autumn.
00:29:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will tell you that this website refresh, along with the CRM change, it has been, I’m going to call it, has been the biggest fail
00:29:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
and the biggest mess that I have experienced in all of the 25 years that I’ve been in business.
00:29:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in the end, it has been by far the most costly mistake that I’ve made, by far.
00:30:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And like I said earlier, I’m still not done cleaning it up.
00:30:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
There are many parts of my website that are still malfunctioning.
00:30:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is a thing.
00:30:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
that we are working on right now.
00:30:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll tell you, I’m trying to have a lot of compassion with myself for making these bad decisions because I was looking for the cheaper route.
00:30:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
I know that the looking for the cheaper route is a protection mechanism, right?
00:30:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
To want to look for bargains, even when I know inside of me it’s probably
00:30:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
a bad idea.
00:30:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s to protect myself.
00:30:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I really do have so much love for that part of myself who is like the immigrant, who feels scared and others, othered, and worries that everything is going to just fall apart tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera.
00:31:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m trying to spin it like the good news about all of this is that the whole situation was so awful that it can only get better from here.
00:31:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
So for me, the moral of the story is that while it is a good thing to save, it’s a very good thing to save.
00:31:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will always be a saver.
00:31:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
And while it is a very good thing to be mindful and discerning with spending, I will always be mindful and discerning with spending.
00:31:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
All that being said, you also want to make sure that your fears about spending aren’t running the show so that you don’t pick the cheap option just for the sake of
00:31:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
it being cheaper, because the cheap option might end up biting you in the ****.
00:32:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, again, I know that this is obvious.
00:32:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
I know, like I said earlier, this is something that we all know, but it’s a lesson that I have metabolized because of everything that’s happened these last months, that I’ve metabolized so much more deeply.
00:32:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
in ways that I’ve really needed to.
00:32:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m never going to be a frivolous spender.
00:32:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I doubt I’ll ever be someone who’s big into luxury or pick like the luxury brand or anything like that.
00:32:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Neither of those things are in my nature.
00:32:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s what’s right for me personally.
00:32:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I also no longer see myself as scrappy.
00:32:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
or needing to be scrappy or needing to always look for the bargain, even despite the bad quality of some of the bargains.
00:33:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
I want to say this again because this is a real identity shift for me, and it it may resonate for some of you.
00:33:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
I didn’t even realize until all of this how scrappy
00:33:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
I saw myself as.
00:33:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this, for me, it’s like a leveling up in my self-identity in a way, knowing that I deserve quality.
00:33:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And,
00:33:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
There are other places where I’ve known I deserve quality, but even more so now.
00:33:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
It really is an important shift in identity for me.
00:33:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will say that the other side lesson from all of this is that
00:34:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even though I’ve always known that my business is really solid, I’ve known that it’s really solid both in terms of infrastructure as well as in terms of quality product and customer loyalty.
00:34:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
this tech disaster with so many things going wrong, it was the ultimate test of all of it.
00:34:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I mean, it tested so much.
00:34:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
My business could have fallen apart, truly, from all of this tech breakdown.
00:34:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m just so, proud to know that
00:34:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
While this kind of tech breakdown might have caused other coaching businesses to shut down, my business has been so solid that it ultimately thrived through all of it.
00:35:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
We had a pretty good year in 2025, even with all of this chaos.
00:35:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay,
00:35:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
So this brings us to lesson #2.
00:35:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
My second lesson that I want to share with you from this last year is don’t take launches so seriously while they’re happening.
00:35:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
and instead, cackle a little bit like the crone when you’re inside of a launch.
00:35:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, I’ll explain in a few minutes what I mean by the crone and the cackle part, but let me give you some context first.
00:35:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
So this is another one of those lessons that I have known for a long time, and it dropped in even more deeply for me this year.
00:35:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
So
00:35:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
My business, Applied Depth Institute, is, for better or worse, a launch-based business.
00:36:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
So what does that mean?
00:36:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
So because I don’t have open-ended, evergreen, rolling admission programs where anyone can join the program all year round,
00:36:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
And instead, I have programs that mostly have a definitive start date and have a definitive end date.
00:36:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because of that, I’m kind of married to launching my programs, having kind of big launches for my programs.
00:36:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Versus with an evergreen or rolling admission program, you can do a little promotion here and a little promotion there, because it’s kind of like all year round.
00:36:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, there is a part of me that wishes I didn’t have a launch-based business.
00:37:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s a part of me that doesn’t wish it, because I actually do love the excitement of launches.
00:37:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
But sometimes it just seems like, it’d be so much easier if there didn’t have to be so many launches.
00:37:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll tell you, for years, I’ve been kind of looking for an alternative to this.
00:37:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ve been trying to figure out specifically, is there a way for me to make the Sacred Depths transformational practitioner training
00:37:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
a rolling admission program.
00:37:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll share with you, and this is a little bit, I’m diverging a little bit from the lesson about launches, but just because I think it will be helpful, I’m just going to share, so far, I haven’t been able to figure it out.
00:37:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ethically, so far, I haven’t found
00:37:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
away because Sacred Depths is a training and it feels so important in the training for people to start at a certain point and then go through a very specific journey and for it to be live training too.
00:38:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m very much into live training.
00:38:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think part of it is because I’m so in love with my content.
00:38:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just, I love teaching it over and over again.
00:38:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
Not so much from the teaching point, though I do love that, but more because it always creates such ahas and breakthroughs and openings for my students that I like to be there and see the look on their faces and hear the shares and all that comes through as they learn it.
00:38:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m kind of like addicted to that.
00:38:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway, I’m not in the rolling admission business right now.
00:38:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
My business is launch-based for the time being.
00:38:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe one day I’ll figure it out differently, but for the time being, my business is launch-based.
00:39:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And now here’s the other thing.
00:39:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this is where we start getting to the lesson here about not taking launches so seriously.
00:39:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
My launches, my program launches, pretty much never, ever, ever unfold the way I want them to unfold.
00:39:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
So you might be wondering, well, Joanna, how do you want your launches to unfold?
00:39:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll tell you, it’s probably the way most entrepreneurs want their launches to unfold, which is that from the moment you open the cart and start promoting, there are just people flying in and flying in.
00:39:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you already know that the launch is just going to be extraordinary, that you’re going to hit all of your numbers and beyond from day one.
00:39:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Doesn’t that sound like a dream?
00:39:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
Doesn’t that sound amazing?
00:39:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
I do see some people posting on social media that their launches are perfect and seamless and totally amazing from the get-go.
00:40:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
And honestly, sometimes I wonder if those people are maybe fitting a little bit because for me, that is just not how it has ever been.
00:40:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
Instead, my launches, like much of my life,
00:40:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
are messy.
00:40:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Yeah, sometimes lots of people step in right away, but even then, there’s usually a lull in the middle of the launch and that can feel excruciating.
00:40:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then it’ll maybe pick up towards the end of the launch when folks realize that the special pricing is ending.
00:40:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or in other launches, sometimes I’ll put out emails and for a bit, I’m just holding my breath for someone to buy.
00:40:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s like crickets in the beginning.
00:40:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I mean, complete and total and utter crickets.
00:41:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then maybe it’s not until the 3rd or 4th or 5th e-mail that we start to see movement happening.
00:41:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Other times I’ll do a preview call for a program, and I’ll get off of that preview call, and I’ll feel great, and I’ll think that tons of people are going to register that day for the special bonus that I offered for that day.
00:41:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then it’s just like little drips on that day.
00:41:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I have to hold my breath again, and it’s not until a few days later that more people register.
00:41:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And on and on and on.
00:41:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s been so many different scenarios, but at the end of the day, the thing that I want you to get from this is that it never looks like the ideal scenario that I wanted it to look like.
00:41:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
Period, end of story.
00:41:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
The one exception to this is
00:42:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
my alumni programs.
00:42:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I can almost always count someone who has already been through Sacred Depths.
00:42:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
When it comes time to sharing the next program, they’re all going to step in pretty quickly for the most part.
00:42:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I always am just so, grateful for that.
00:42:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so anyway, my launches are messy.
00:42:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
My launches are touch and go.
00:42:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
my launches don’t unfold the way that I wanted them to necessarily unfold.
00:42:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
But here’s the thing.
00:42:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
No matter how messy or touch and go my launches are, they always work out in the end.
00:42:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
And when I say that they always work out in the end,
00:42:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
What I mean is that most of the time I reach my registrant goals or even exceed them.
00:43:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes we even end up with more people than I was going for.
00:43:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
But there’s some times when I don’t quite reach my goals.
00:43:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:43:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
Over the course of my business career, there have been one or two times where things just went so sideways that I canceled the program.
00:43:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And guess what?
00:43:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m still here.
00:43:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
I haven’t burst into flames just because a launch wasn’t rainbows and unicorns, just because it was touch and go, just because it didn’t unfold the way that I thought it would.
00:43:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m still here.
00:43:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
My children still love me most of the time.
00:43:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
The sun still rises.
00:43:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
And my business doesn’t burst into flames when a launch doesn’t go in the way that I thought it would.
00:43:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s a disappointment for sure, but life goes on pretty much exactly as it was before.
00:44:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And by the way,
00:44:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s the same for when I do hit my numbers or exceed my numbers.
00:44:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m still me.
00:44:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
My life is still my life with all of its beauty and all of its frustrations.
00:44:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
The numbers don’t really change that much.
00:44:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
The how it goes, you know, if it was touch and go, if people didn’t come in right away and then they did come in, right?
00:44:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just, it’s all still there.
00:44:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
So
00:44:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I understand all of this now, after 25 years of launching, because I’ve executed so many launches.
00:44:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I can see, I can see that these are how the cycles go.
00:45:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
At some point, I’m going to take the time to actually count up how many launches there have been, because there have been so many big launches, small launches, long launches, short launches.
00:45:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And again, from this perspective, from this vantage point, I can look back over all of those launches, all of those years, and I can see so, clearly that
00:45:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
The way that my launches work is that they’re messy in terms of what to expect day by day, play by play.
00:45:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re unpredictable of if people are going to come in in the beginning, or the middle, or the end, or this, that, and the other thing.
00:45:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s how it goes for me.
00:45:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s my process.
00:45:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And just side note, of course, I can get better and better at trying to predict some things, right?
00:46:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
The more you look at data, the more you know what levers to pull, what messages work, what bonuses work, et cetera, et cetera.
00:46:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m still working towards all of that.
00:46:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
But the truth is, some of it is also just how it goes, right?
00:46:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can’t control all of the things.
00:46:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
So anyway, I know that my launches are messy and that in the end, even with the mess, it all still works out in the end, one way or another.
00:46:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And yet, even though I know this, and I have known this for, you know, I’d say the last three, four years, until about a year or two ago, I didn’t
00:46:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
really understand this deep in my bones.
00:46:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And because I didn’t really understand this deep in my bones, inevitably, I would get either depressed or anxious as soon as a launch would get started if I wouldn’t see people immediately coming in.
00:47:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or I’d get really down if people didn’t buy right away after a preview event.
00:47:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’d go, for whatever reason, right, name the launch 10 different reasons, I’d go into a kind of catastrophic emergency feeling, totally forgetting in the moment that my launches in the end usually work out just fine.
00:47:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’d go into the catastrophic emergency feelings.
00:47:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’d ride the roller coaster of the launch, of the ups and downs, of the touch and go, when really what I should have been doing inside of those launches is remembering the bigger picture, remembering that it’s OK for things to be messy,
00:48:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
or to not unfold the way that I had envisioned exactly them unfolding.
00:48:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
But over this last year, in 2025, something around all of this really started to deeply shift inside of me.
00:48:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
I finally learned the lesson.
00:48:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:48:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
This actually even started, I started to notice this already in 2024.
00:48:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
Already in 2024, I stopped going into emergency mode in sign of launches for the most part.
00:48:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
But even more so over this last year.
00:48:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
And what I realize now is that
00:48:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
after all the years of seeing the cycles and the phases of the launches play out, that I can trust more in the cycles and the phases of the launches.
00:49:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And my launches in 2025, almost all of them were pretty successful.
00:49:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
by the time we got to the end.
00:49:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
There was one that wasn’t, and if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t put enough effort into it.
00:49:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway, my point for right now is that I’ve started to take what I call a crone
00:49:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
approach and attitude to my launches once I’m in them.
00:49:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
So what is the crone approach and attitude to launches?
00:49:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Well, the crone, she’s older, she’s experienced, she’s seen
00:50:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
a lot of life.
00:50:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s seen it all.
00:50:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s seen the cycles and the phases and the cycles and the phases.
00:50:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the crow knows that life is filled with triumph and with disappointment and that not everything unfolds or turns out the way that you thought it would.
00:50:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And from seeing it all and seeing so much of it over the years, the crone knows that that’s okay.
00:50:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
The crone has seen so many launches and all of the weird and messy ways that it unfolds.
00:50:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And she actually knows that it’s all kind of funny in a way, right?
00:50:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
That when things go wrong or when you get crickets,
00:51:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can cackle at it.
00:51:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
It can be funny, because you have to take it all so seriously.
00:51:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
It doesn’t have to be an immediate emergency, or at any point, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an emergency.
00:51:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
The crone inside of me knows that, for the most part, it works out.
00:51:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
So why get myself in such a huff?
00:51:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
in the moment to moment when it’s not looking the way that it should.
00:51:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll tell you, this crone approach for me over this last year, it has made everything inside of launches so much more fun.
00:51:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
It has made everything way less stressful.
00:51:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And of course,
00:51:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m not going to lie.
00:51:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
There have been total moments where I’ve still had anxiety, where I’ve gotten stressed out, where, you know, this and that, but it has just been so much decreased.
00:52:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m just like enjoying my launches more.
00:52:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
The other thing about this crone approach and not getting so stressed out and not getting so catastrophic and not making everything mean, oh my gosh, this is the end and it’s not working, like all of that stuff.
00:52:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
The other thing about it is taking the other approach, the crone approach, the like, this is how things play out.
00:52:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
It allows me
00:52:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
Number one, to maintain my energy during a launch.
00:52:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And number two, it allows me to keep on showing up, to not get defeated, to not get deflated, to not lose my curiosity.
00:53:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
It allows me to show up, to continue to put, you know, my stake in the ground for the message, for the impact that I’m trying to make.
00:53:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it allows me to be more dynamic
00:53:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
and creative inside of my launches, which is what launches need.
00:53:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is what part of what live launches need is for you to be dynamic and creative, for you to see, okay, that didn’t quite work.
00:53:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
So instead of me just getting deflated and depressed, what about it didn’t work?
00:53:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
What can I do next in this launch?
00:53:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
How do I need to shift the message?
00:53:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
What was I not clear enough about?
00:53:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
What needs to be said differently?
00:53:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
What needs to be done differently?
00:53:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
What do I need to have more patience with and see how it’s going to play out?
00:53:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:53:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
So one of the reasons why
00:54:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
I chose this particular lesson out of so many that I wanted to share with you on today’s episode at the beginning of the year is because I know my people, I know my listeners, and I know that many of you are doing the catastrophic thinking thing inside of your launches.
00:54:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
You’re making it mean everything.
00:54:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
You’re being really heavy about all of it.
00:54:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then you may end up feeling super stressed or dejected, or you may…
00:54:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
end up making stories about your future success, or you simply just take yourself out of the game from the launch that you’re in and you stop trying or you stop meeting the moment, and then it’s not going to end up being successful.
00:55:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I want to remind you that your job is to stay present during your launches.
00:55:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
is for you to stay hopeful during your launches, is for you to continue to show up and to see them through and to try not to be on the roller coaster so much.
00:55:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because when you get on that roller coaster, then it’s hard to see what needs to be seen in terms of course correction with
00:55:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
a launch or even to just be more patient to see your plan through.
00:55:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I want to remind you to cackle like the crone inside of your launches.
00:55:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
Remember that this too shall pass.
00:55:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And even if this launch just ends up not bringing in enough people or any people,
00:56:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Remember, there’s always another way.
00:56:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s always something else to try.
00:56:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s always something else to do.
00:56:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s always another plan.
00:56:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
It doesn’t mean anything about you or your future success.
00:56:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, let’s move on to the third lesson for today.
00:56:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that lesson,
00:56:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
that I really got in 2025 is it’s okay to really let yourself be supported and to ask for what you need.
00:56:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’ll start here with this one.
00:56:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
I am actually generally really good in lots of ways with receiving support
00:57:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
and at asking certain people for what I need.
00:57:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
John, my husband, is my rock.
00:57:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
He is an incredible human.
00:57:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
I really lucked out with him.
00:57:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And he’s also a generous human.
00:57:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I almost never hesitate to ask John for what I need.
00:57:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
whether it’s helping with the kids or running an errand or giving me extra love and attention when I’m upset, et cetera, et cetera.
00:57:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’d also say I’m pretty good at delegating with my team and letting everyone on the team know what I need, of course, within reason of what’s appropriate inside of a professional team.
00:57:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And inside of my friendships, to a big, big extent, I’ve always been a natural at sharing the hardest things with my friends and allowing them to see me in it and in the struggle.
00:58:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
I have no problem with any of that.
00:58:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
But that being said, when my mother died,
00:58:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
I had some really big needs, specifically by way of needing to know that I was deeply loved and supported and seen as I moved through the first week in particular of my grieving and of all of the funeral.
00:58:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
all the funeral rites and the Shiva rites in Jewish tradition.
00:58:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
We sit Shiva for the first week after somebody dies.
00:58:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I know that meeting a lot of people around when you’re grieving isn’t the right thing for everyone who’s grieving.
00:59:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
I actually, right now, I have a close friend, a very close friend who
00:59:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
recently lost her mother, and she chose to have a very private funeral.
00:59:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was just her and her aunt who attended and nobody else.
00:59:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
But for me, when my mother died, I recognized right away that it was going to be really important for me to have lots of people who loved me at my mother’s funeral.
00:59:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it kind of surprised me, actually, because
00:59:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
While I’ve always leaned on friendships to some extent for support, I’ve never felt like I needed the support, really.
00:59:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s kind of been more of like a really nice perk of having good friendships.
00:59:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
But this was the first time that I felt like I needed it.
00:59:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I needed the support.
01:00:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
So
01:00:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
It felt like a big deal to me to let my friends know that I really, really wanted them to show up for me, either for the funeral in New Jersey or for my friends who live in Charlotte to come to the Shiva at my house in Charlotte.
01:00:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
And, you know, it felt like such a big ask for me.
01:00:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s funny to even say out loud because
01:00:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’d hop on a plane in an instant for any friend who needed me to be there for them for pretty much any reason.
01:00:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
But back in April, when it came to asking, I don’t know, I felt sheepish about it.
01:00:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I felt a little weird about it.
01:00:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
I definitely felt hesitant to ask.
01:00:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
Like, I don’t know, like I didn’t have the right or that I’d be burdening others or putting them out.
01:00:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And again, it’s just so weird because I know, that my friends love me so much, but I was feeling the stretch in it.
01:01:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
But even though I was feeling the stretch, I was so clear that this was absolutely what I needed for myself.
01:01:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
And of course, the truth is that
01:01:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I didn’t even really have to make the ask from most of my friends.
01:01:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
They just let me know before I even asked them that they would be there at the funeral, at the Shiva.
01:01:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I can’t even express fully in words what it meant to me and what it continues to mean to me that so many people showed up for me with such deep love.
01:01:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
First of all, one of my besties from high school, she completely took over.
01:01:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
I mean, I was in a daze, in the days after my mother died.
01:02:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so this bestie, she completely took over.
01:02:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
She arranged all of the food and the logistics so that we would have food and drinks and everything that we needed at my parents’ house for when people came over.
01:02:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
right after the funeral, this friend knew that neither my sister or I were in a state to organize anything.
01:02:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
And she also knew that both my parents are only children.
01:02:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
So we didn’t really have any close family who could help.
01:02:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this friend just showed up to support.
01:02:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
She made it happen.
01:02:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I allowed her.
01:02:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Like, I just
01:02:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
handed it over to her.
01:02:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I allowed myself to not be able to do.
01:02:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
I am a superwoman usually in my life.
01:02:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
I do all the things.
01:02:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m the one that takes care.
01:02:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I just let her take over.
01:02:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then after that, all of my besties, every single one of them from high school showed up.
01:03:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
not only for the funeral, but also for every night of the Shiva in New Jersey.
01:03:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it wasn’t only that my high school friends showed up.
01:03:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Their parents came and their siblings came to come and support me.
01:03:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of my best friends from college flew out from Michigan for the funeral.
01:03:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
My close, close friends from my women’s circle from my days in New York City came, my spiritual sisters, who even years after we all lived in the same area, we still circled up every week on Zoom during COVID.
01:03:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Those women came from Brooklyn and upstate New York and New Hampshire.
01:03:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
My first ever boyfriend from when I was a teenager, who to this day is still one of my dearest and closest friends, he came in from Massachusetts.
01:04:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
And his parents came to the funeral also.
01:04:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
And on and on and on.
01:04:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you know what?
01:04:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
I let all of them, every single person who showed up for me,
01:04:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
I let them support me.
01:04:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
I let myself be held by them on the day of the funeral.
01:04:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in the days after the funeral, I really surrendered.
01:04:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I trusted that I could be seen and loved and held and taken care of even in my lowest moments.
01:04:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I also trusted that I didn’t have to do it all by myself.
01:04:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then when I returned back to North Carolina, it was on the last day of Shiva.
01:05:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I came back to North Carolina purposely from New Jersey before the end of Shiva because I still felt the need.
01:05:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
I felt
01:05:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
that it was really important to be seen and held and supported by my local friends as well, to have the evidence for myself that I was loved by my local community.
01:05:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
You know, it’s funny, even though I’ve already lived here in Charlotte for over 13 years now, I still think of my Charlotte friends as my new friends.
01:05:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And even though there are so many parts of me that know they love me,
01:05:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
I sometimes don’t fully trust.
01:05:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
As an aside on all of this, at some point, I want to do a whole podcast episode on entrepreneurship and friendship.
01:06:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in friendship in general, because it’s not always so easy to make friends as adults.
01:06:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
And when we’re busy entrepreneurs, I know it’s a thing.
01:06:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we’ll do a whole podcast episode on it.
01:06:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway,
01:06:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
That night, my house in Charlotte was filled with over 60 people who came to support me.
01:06:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the love that I felt on that night, it also made all of the difference for me.
01:06:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It got me through so much.
01:06:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Also, I do want to say that the outpouring of love after my mother died that I received from
01:06:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
so many of my clients and my students and from so many of you in the Coaching Revolution podcast community, that also meant the world to me.
01:06:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was another thing that helped me get through the toughest of tough days and weeks and first months after my mom died.
01:07:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Oh, I’m actually feeling a little teary-eyed right now, just feeling the gratitude.
01:07:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
when all those people showed up, I really took the time to viscerally feel the love and support from each person who reached out and showed up.
01:07:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
And, at other points in my life, I might have been embarrassed to say that I needed so much love from so many people, but the truth is that
01:07:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
at that moment in my life, all of that love and support and validation of love, like all of that was truly exactly what I needed.
01:07:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m so glad that I allowed myself to feel the need and that I allowed myself to ask for what I needed and that I allowed myself to feel the support.
01:08:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
And there was another piece to all of this that was really huge for me.
01:08:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
In addition to giving myself the permission to ask for support and receive support, I also gave myself permission to not respond to people right away.
01:08:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
if I needed the space or I just didn’t have the bandwidth or the capacity, I just didn’t respond.
01:08:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this was so big for me because I am a lifelong people pleaser.
01:08:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And even though I’ve come so far with the people pleasing over the decades, I’ve definitely gotten better.
01:08:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will tell you at age 50, I am still
01:09:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
I am still learning how to not abandon myself and my needs just to make other people feel comfortable.
01:09:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in those days and weeks and months after my mother died, in the moments when I really just needed the space, when I just couldn’t be with or speak to another person,
01:09:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
I allowed myself to not respond to the texts, to not respond to the phone calls.
01:09:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And these were all of the same people, by the way, the same exact people who I had asked to come and be there for me for the funeral or the Shiva.
01:09:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it was so huge for me to also take the space that I needed.
01:09:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
All of this.
01:09:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
the asking for what I need, the commitment to really taking in support from others, and the commitment to myself instead of people pleasing, all of this has made such a big impact on me.
01:10:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s really changed me for the better.
01:10:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
I feel deeper in my bones than ever before, that I’m loved,
01:10:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
and that I have a true support system, and that it’s more than okay to need a support system sometimes.
01:10:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And for the rest of my life, and again, I’m tearing up saying this.
01:10:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just feel so much emotion.
01:10:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
For the rest of my life, when I remember those first days and months after my mother died,
01:10:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m going to remember the incredible grief, of course, but I’m also going to remember all of the love that was there for me.
01:10:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I am so, grateful for it.
01:11:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so there you have it.
01:11:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
Three lessons from 2025.
01:11:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll tell you, it’s so funny because when I first started writing this podcast episode, my intention was I had seven lessons that I wanted to share.
01:11:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then as I started writing the episode, I realized that we were going to need many, many hours if I were going to share seven.
01:11:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I promise I will work many of those other lessons.
01:11:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
into podcast episodes or newsletter articles this coming year.
01:11:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, if it feels right for you, I want to invite you to take some time to reflect on what some of your biggest lessons were in 2025.
01:11:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
What did you learn that has been impactful or meaningful to you?
01:11:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
What did you learn about yourself?
01:11:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
or your capacity, or what works for you, or what doesn’t work for you?
01:12:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
What were some of the lessons in your personal life?
01:12:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
What were some of the lessons in your professional life?
01:12:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Every year as part of my yearly review, one of the many pieces that I look at is what did I learn this last year?
01:12:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s a way of honoring what I’ve been through,
01:12:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
but it’s also information for me to take forward, right?
01:12:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s strategies.
01:12:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s important stuff.
01:12:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I really hope that you got exactly what you needed from the three lessons that I shared today and from our time today.
01:12:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you got value from this podcast episode, would you do me a favor?
01:12:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
And actually, it’s two favors.
01:12:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
So first,
01:12:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
If this episode was meaningful to you, I’d really, really love to hear from you.
01:13:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Shoot me an e-mail.
01:13:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can send it to info@applieddepthinstitute.com.
01:13:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And let me know what was meaningful, what really touched you in this episode, what you loved, what you learned.
01:13:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also, if you do that little exercise about
01:13:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
exploring what your own lessons from 2025 are, I’d love to hear those too.
01:13:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let me know.
01:13:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It would really mean so much to me to hear from you on any of this.
01:13:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I will personally read each note that you send and I will also write you back.
01:13:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
The second favor, if you loved this episode or any of my podcast episodes,
01:13:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
Would you tell your friends about it?
01:13:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
is really the best way for me to get the word out and to share what I’m trying to do here, which is to support practitioners, coaches, therapists, and humans to not only be the best practitioner that you can be, but to
01:14:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Be the best human that you can be.
01:14:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I don’t mean by improving yourself, by the way.
01:14:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
I mean by learning to love yourself more and love your experience more.
01:14:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
So please, share.
01:14:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
Oh, and…
01:14:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Curriculum lab starts next week.
01:14:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you’ve been eyeing the curriculum lab, if you know that you are ready to articulate your thought leadership into a body of work, into a program, if you know that you are ready to level up your curriculum and your program to create transformational exercises inside of your programs,
01:14:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
to shift things so that your people are more engaged and have better results inside of your programs, please, join us.
01:15:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
The Curriculum Lab is epic.
01:15:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
You will learn so much and you will get the curriculum work done in real time.
01:15:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
All right, till next time, I am sending lots of love.
01:15:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
.

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