246: Taking A Stand

This transcript for the Intentional Advantage–called one of the best productivity podcasts for women– was created using AI.

Tanya Dalton is a female productivity expert and motivational keynote speaker. She speaks about finding balance, time management, goal setting and decision making to audiences of women in Corporate America, entrepreneur groups and women’s organizations.

Extraordinary is a choice. Take that in, soak it up because of the hustle grind, repeat mantra that society has been touting for decades. It had it all wrong. I’m Tanya Dalton. I’m a seven figure. Entrepreneur bestselling author, speaker, mom, and rule breaker. I’m here to help you live to your fullest potential. That’s what this podcast is all about.

The Intentional advantage is doing life on our own terms. Define the status quo and seeing ourselves outside of the tidy definition. Society’s name for us. It’s intentionally choosing to step back away from the chaotic rush of your every everyday and choosing, choosing to see that it’s your world. And it’s filled with opportunities. Let’s challenge the bedrock beliefs that so many have wholeheartedly trusted because we were told they were truths.

Let’s have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Let’s choose to be extraordinary. Hello, Hello, and welcome to the Intentional advantage podcast. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 246. Whew. It’s going to be a big one guys. This, this is going to be a big episode because I want to get up on my soap box for a bit.

But here’s the thing often when I get on my soap box, that’s when I hear from so many of you that this is what you want more of. This is what you want to hear from me. This episode that we’re going to put out into the world today is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s something I have wrestled with.

It’s something that I have fought with internally. It’s something that has quite frankly, just scared the shit out of me and I’m doing it anyways. This episode, I’ve decided to title it, taking a stand, because that is what I’m doing today. I am going to take a stand. So before we get into what I’m going to do, that scares me to death,

but I’m doing it anyways. Let’s talk about taking a stand. Let’s talk about why that scares me so much. And the truth is when you take a stand on something, when you step into your own power, when you stand in alignment with who you are, who you want to be and what your values are, other people can get offended. Other people can easily get offended and get upset because they think it’s a judgment of them.

That if I decide that I don’t want to do something, or if I decide that this doesn’t align for me, that if it feels okay to you, or if it aligns for you, that there’s, that I’m saying, there’s something wrong with you. And that’s, that’s not it at all. So just know that when I talk about taking a stand,

it’s really about aligning with what it is that matters to you and you alone. And today that’s, that’s what the episode is about. You know, I used to call it turning my cruise ship. It was like this very slow controlled turn to get to where I want to go. I didn’t want to rock the boat so to speak. I didn’t want people to get upset.

So I took this very slow turning of the cruise ship. And I made a decision that that takes far too long. It is excruciating. And when you are not in alignment, it doesn’t feel right. So this is not a turning of my cruise ship. This is a sharp turn. I am jerking the wheel and I am making a decision right here.

And right now, very publicly that I need to stand for who I am. It is a time for me to return to my values. And if I’m being honest here and you know, on this podcast, I loved it. I loved being honest with you. So if we’re being honest, I have been out of alignment for far too long because I’ve been doing the things that I thought I was supposed to be doing as a business owner,

as an author, as a thought leader, I was doing what everybody else was doing, because I was told that if I didn’t keep doing this, then this was career suicide, which can explain why this is scaring me to death. Right? But you know what scares me more than taking a stand, not taking a stance, not living in alignment,

not living a life. That’s true to me and what I want. I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. I want to be a category of one. I want to stand for who I am and what I believe, regardless of what anyone else thinks or believes or feels. Because if there is one truth in this world, is that there are things I can’t control,

like my actions, my choice to take a stand. And there are things I cannot control, which is how everybody else reacts. So I’m going to step into what I can control. And I’m going to do that today. You know, the week that this goes live is Thanksgiving week. And for inkWELL Press, we have taken a stand for a long time that we do not do black Friday sales because Thanksgiving is a time to spend with family.

That that is really important to me, regardless of what that costs my company. We lose a lot of sales, not being open for black Friday, but it’s more important for me that my team has time with their families. So I’ve taken a stand in the past. This one is just so much more personal. And again, I have taken a stand in the past.

There are certain stores that I do not frequent that I do not shop at their stores. I haven’t shopped at for years because they don’t align with my values. I do not spend money at Victoria secret. I do not shop. I do not eat dinner at Ruth’s Chris. I do not. I do not buy items from Walgreens. So you might be asking like,

why is it that I don’t? Well, these companies don’t align with me and I’ll give you a great example. The Walgreens example, I think a lot of people think Walgreens, white Rite aid, CVS, they’re all the same thing. But you know, all of those stores, if you look at their missions, if you look at what they stand for,

they stand for health and they are establishment that are there to better people’s health. Well, back in 2014, CVS really began to question was what were they acting in alignment with those values, with that mission that they stood for. And they decided that by selling cigarettes, they didn’t, they didn’t align with their values. So they made a decision. They made a choice at a high revenue cost to take all their tobacco products off the shelf.

So if you walk into a CVS today, there are no tobacco products. There’s no cigarettes. There’s no, none of that. E-cigarettes none of that is there because it doesn’t align. And when challenged companies like Walgreens and Rite aid, they were too busy looking at the bottom line and they have continued to look at the bottom line and continue to sell tobacco products.

So I don’t like that. They’re not in alignment with what I believe, which I believe tobacco products are not good for you. And I, I really admire companies that stand for what they believe and CVS has done that. So if I have a choice in generally anytime you see a CVS, there’s a whole Walgreens or Rite aid across the street, I will purposely if needed,

make the U-turn to go to the other side of the street to go and buy from CVS. Because I agree with the fact that they are in alignment for what they believe in. So now it’s time for me to step into alignment for what I believe in. And so I have made a decision that I am no longer going to be on the major social media channels.

I’m no longer going to be on Facebook or Instagram to places where I have frequently showed up for my personal brand for my personal life. I am no longer going to be posting on my accounts, my pages, my feeds, my groups, none of that any longer, because it does not align. And I want to be, I want to be the CVS.

I want to be the person who stands for what she believes in and follows through with that. And now the thing is, is as someone who writes books with major publishing houses, who coaches women and does, you know, VIP days with women and do those kinds of things, you could look at that and say, oh my gosh, that is going to kill your business.

But I would rather my business not succeed than to live out of alignment with what I believe and what I stand for. So I’ve made a decision starting January 1st, 2022. I will no longer be posting on my social media accounts on my feeds on my pages, in my groups. I’m done. I’m taking a stand for what I believe. Now there are a lot of things that I have loved about being on these channels.

I love the connection that I get. I love getting to connect deeper with people who resonate with my message. I love that I get DMS from so many of you. I love the community aspect. I mean, we had so much fun with my launch team. All of those things are amazing, but the platform doesn’t align. And if I am showing up on these channels,

that don’t align with who I am and what I believe in my values, that’s not okay. Because when I say to you, come and join my Facebook group or con and DM me on Instagram, or tag me on Facebook. I’m endorsing them. I’m telling you, come on over. This is where I am. So you should be here too.

And I don’t endorse anything. I don’t believe in on this podcast. I have never once run a mid-roll ad or endorsed a person or a product that I did not truly believe in. And so I think it’s time for me to do that on a much bigger scale. And I truly believe that thinking that we have to be on social media in order to thrive and grow,

that’s a limiting belief. I think there are a thousand ways that I can show up differently and still have connection. Still have that community still have those, those ways of, of deepening the connections I have with you when I made this choice. And it’s not something that I decided really easily. It’s something I have truly struggled with and wrestled with. And if you’ve been paying attention to me on social media,

you can see I’m not posting very often there because it’s been a struggle. And so I made a list of my fears and the facts. And you know, if you’ve read on purpose, there’s a whole blueprint about turning your fears into facts. I have to do that for myself. You know, when I write these things in these books, oftentimes it’s because these are things that I have struggled with,

or that I know that, that you maybe struggle with because I do as well. So I took my fears and I turned them into facts. And so the fact is, this is just a challenge for me. How do I create connection? How do I open up channels of communication between me and you? Because that’s really what I want. So you may have noticed my newsletter has changed.

You know, I send out a weekly newsletter every Tuesday with Steph about the podcast, and it’s become much more personal. It’s become more of a, a personal journal that I send you telling you stories behind the scenes, or are sharing things that are going on with my family. And so I want to deepen that connection with our emails. I don’t want it to just be like,

here’s what the podcast is about this week. How can I make that connection bigger? And I’m asking for you to reply to those, my team and I, we read all of your responses and we reply back. So I’ve also thought about doing live interactive events. I just hosted that live event, how to set and achieve your goals, partially because I wanted to see what that felt like.

What if we did more of those? What if we did more events where we could come together as a community of a community of women who stand in the belief that we want to live our lives with intention, could that be more powerful than having a longstanding Facebook group or sending me DMS that you could interact face-to-face with me on these calls, you know,

I’ve thought about ideas about how can I think outside of the box with doing, maybe we do ask me anything calls were where we hop on these live interactive platforms and, and we chat and you ask me questions and I, I do pocket coaching with you and things like that. I think there’s a lot of ways that we can really expand this idea of connection and it doesn’t have to happen on a platform that I cannot control.

And that’s what I don’t like. Facebook has the ability to ban me from my own group. And it has in the past because it didn’t like something. I said, it didn’t like a leak that I gave, or it didn’t like a hashtag that I use. I’ve been kicked off Facebook twice without even realizing it or knowing it, or, you know,

not intentionally doing that. And I don’t like that. You know, we have this illusion of control over our environment, but if we are connecting with our friends and family and our followers in a place that we do not have any element of control over how we appear or how it sends it out to you or, or any of that, or whether it can ban us or not,

we don’t have any control. We are handing our power over to somebody that we don’t even really trust. I don’t know about you, but I have a strong distrust of the whole metaverse and all of that, that just came out. And really what I want to do is I want to step outside of the status quo, the opening lines of on purpose.

Talk about the fact that that book is not about helping you fit into the status, because when we struggle and strain and force ourselves inside the tiny little boxes society makes for us, we are just going with the flow. We’re not standing for what we believe in. And it means that we are not standing in our zone of genius. And the truth is on social media.

There is too much consumption, way too much how to, and not enough creativity. I want more creativity. I feel like I am losing my magic. I’m losing my magic because I find myself in the doom scroll where I don’t even enjoy the platform necessarily. I let me back that up. I do love getting to see what’s going on with the people I care about,

but I find myself in this infinite scroll of just going through the screen and I wake up and it’s been 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And I don’t like myself. I don’t like myself at the end of that. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel whole, I don’t feel confident. I feel like I question myself more. I think that I’m not good enough.

I feel like, I think, oh, I need to be posting more. Look at all these people who are doing all these posts. I should be posting more doing something I don’t even really enjoy resonate with. You know, I asked my kids all the time when they’re watching the watch, these YouTube videos of people playing video games, and I’ll ask my kids,

okay, are you living your life? Or are you living someone else’s and I’m afraid I’m falling into that trap myself. And here I am a grown ass woman. Who’s bubbling over with confidence, right? I mean, I am confident about what I do and yet I get off of social media and my confidence level has dropped like, not a little bit,

not a point or two, but it has just plummeted. And if that’s how I feel, how do other people feel? Who aren’t as confident? How do, how do my kids feel? So this is what I’m doing. I’m taking a stance. And if I want to be a mother of a movement, which is really what I want, I don’t want to just write books or have a podcast.

I don’t want to just have live events. I want to inspire women to move towards whatever it is they want and desire. I want people to be as passionate about what they do as I am. So I want to be the mother of a movement. Who do I want to be? I get to decide that chapter two of the book is all about choosing your own identity.

I get to choose that. But stepping into this birthing, this is painful. It is breaking free of the matrix and doing the things that everybody else expects. Everybody else is doing everybody else’s in line for. It’s tough. It’s hard, but watching what everybody else is doing, that’s a distraction. And not one of the nourishing distractions that we talk about in the book,

but a negative distraction. I’m trying to damn hard to fit in. And if you read on purpose, you know, I smashed that box. I was supposed to be trying to cram myself into, but the box keeps trying to remake itself. The thing is, is this at the heart of it at the heart of this decision, is that I don’t like what social media does.

I don’t like what it stands for. I don’t like how it makes me feel out of alignment with who I want to be my cathedral of what I envisioned myself to be in this bright, beautiful future, this vision that I have family, for me, that is a big core value. And I don’t like what it does to family. I don’t like what social media is doing to family.

I watch how it affects children. And just to be clear here, I’m not insisting that anyone else in my family or anywhere else gets off social media. This is a personal choice. I hope it’s a choice that maybe gives you pause. It makes you think about how you’re consuming social media, but I’m not telling you what you need to do or anyone else,

but I don’t like what it’s doing. And to me, the final straw for me was this. I had a conversation with Kay, not that long ago where she was telling me about something that happened at school. And one of her friends started having a tick. And then she said, and then five or six other girls started having these ticks as well.

And I said, oh, hold on. Do all these kids have Tourette’s? And she’s like, oh yeah, they all have Tourette’s. I was like, that’s so strange. I didn’t think Tourette’s was that prevalent. I thought it was one of those things that didn’t occur very often. And I kid you not like three or four days later, I came across an article.

I think it was in the New York times about how psychologists and psychiatrists have now formed a very clear, very direct connection in the increase in Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s syndrome is up 10 times what it’s been historically and what is causing it is Tik TOK. I’ll try to put a post to that article in the show notes. I’ll see if I can find it.

I sent it to several people, so I should be able to find it. But I found that shocking to Rhett’s is, is being caused and is only increased by tick talk by watching people on tick-tock. I found that shocking. I found that upsetting, and I thought, how can while I’m not on tick-tock I still think to myself, Tik TOK is yet just another one of these social media platforms.

So do I feel okay with aligning with something that is causing problems for our kids, for our youth, not to mention what it’s doing for us as grown women filters, don’t normalize natural aging, and nobody’s using, you know, straight out of the camera when it comes to video themselves, myself included because you look around and everyone looks great, but that’s because we’ve got filters and no wonder,

we feel like that need to do things to ourselves, to spend hours on end, making ourselves look better instead of just allowing aging to be okay. I feel like social media is an escape. It really is. I know it’s an escape for me. It becomes a default where I just find myself scrolling through because I’ve got a spare moment instead of just sitting and thinking like I used to do.

That’s one of my favorite things when I get on an airplane is to, I purposely intentionally do not do work on a plane unless it’s brainstorming. I don’t pull out a computer. I don’t get on the wifi. I use it as a time just to let my brain explore and to create. And this is how some of the best things I’ve come up with have happened.

They’ve happened on airplanes because I’m unplugged. But I find myself naturally defaulting to plugging in and just scrolling through the phone. And the thing I don’t like too is how I feel like it sucks up our time. It does. I get probably a good number of the hate mail that I get. And we’ve talked about hate mail in the past that yes,

I get hate mail. The hate mail that I get is when people are irritated with me about the fact that I tell them, you know, you, you need, we could do these things or these things are possible. And they say, who do you think you are? I have the time to do these things. I don’t have time to make a priority list.

I don’t have time to set my goals. I don’t have time to do these things in my personal life. And I’m like, oh, but you have time to reach out to a stranger on Instagram and send me a very long, some typed message about how terrible you think I am. I find that astounding. You don’t have the time, but here you are in social media.

And so again, if I’m showing up on social media, I’m endorsing it. I’m saying, Hey, it’s okay, come on over. This is where we should be. This is where we should hang out. When in truth, where I want you to hang out is with me. Honestly, if it was up to me, we would do huge live events.

We could just come together because I would love nothing more than to hug you and be in the same room with you. I don’t believe the future is virtual. I believe the future is in person because in person is when we change lives. And I find that when I’m not intentional with social media, which is my natural default, and I think is the default for a lot of people.

When we follow on social media, we are not leading. We’re following by definition. We are following what everybody else is doing. And so I know this might be something that my publishers don’t like, or that some of the people that I’m partnered with, don’t like that I’m doing for my personal brand. This is me in my personal sphere, all of the Tanya Dalton stuff,

the Tanya Dalton, Instagram account and Facebook and the Tanya Dalton groups. I’m closing them down because this is how we start a movement. We start with a pebble that causes ripples. When you stand for what you believe in those ripples, expand and grow, it starts with you. And then it spreads to our friends and our family. It spreads if you have a business to your business and your industry and eventually to the world,

but it starts with one person taking a stand, making a decision to stand in their own power, to stand in their own truth and do what aligns. And that’s what I’m doing now. So I would love to hear from you clearly not on social media, but you know, in my emails, like I said, I’m really, I’m really wanting my,

my emails to you each week to feel much more personal, much more behind the scenes, much more true to who I am. I want you to see those as an extension of what we do on this podcast, a chance to connect, and I encourage you to reply to those emails. We do my team and I, we do talk about what you,

you send us and what you say and what you want to hear. All of those things are important to me. I’d love to hear from you what you would like to see me doing. If I’m not on social media, do you like the idea of the, ask me anything interactive calls or doing more of the interactive events or, you know, doing maybe some pop-ups that we do in person when I travel and do speaking,

doing some pop-up events where we gather together, even if it’s just at a coffee shop or a restaurant or something like that, that to me is truly what I’m looking for. That’s what I want not to be pulled out of my every day by feeling like I have to post that if I don’t post my business is dying. I don’t think that’s true.

And it’s time for me to stand in it. So you can email me@helloatTanyadalton.com. You can sign up for those emails@Tanyadalton.com slash email. And I’ll send you an email each week. Where are we? We do feel like it’s a little more personal, a little more behind the scenes. So Tanya dalton.com/email is how you get to connect with me on my emails.

And in the meantime, through the end of the year, my new hashtag is no more not doing this anymore. No more social media, no more trying to fit in. And I know for those of you listening, the week this goes live, this is Thanksgiving. Make this a conversation, maybe talk to people. What would that look like? If you weren’t on social media,

how could you connect with people? If you didn’t have social media, could you text more? Could you get on phone calls more? Could you do zoom calls? I know for me and my kids, when we, we get on with our relatives and we get to video chat with each other, that’s so much deeper than when I posted an update so much,

so much stronger, that connection becomes, and that’s ultimately what I’m looking for. And that is what aligns with me. So want, I encourage you to stand in your beliefs no matter what they are or what they may look like, whether they aligned with what I’m saying here or not, what is it that’s important to you? What can you do to take action on something you feel strongly about?

Because when we stand in our own power, when we stand true to who we are, what we want and what we believe our future can look like. That’s when we have the Intentional advantage. Thanks so much for joining me today. Quick question though, before you go, do you like prizes? When you leave a rating and review of the Intentional advantage podcast,

you’ll be entered to win my life changing course, multiplying your time. Simply leave the review and then send me an email@helloatTanyadalton.com with a screenshot. I choose one winner at the end of every month. So go ahead. Do it right now. Just a quick comment with what you loved about this episode or the show in general and a rating and send it our way.

Not going to lie by stars is my favorite, but I’d love to hear what you think of the show. And if that’s not enough of an incentive for you to win the multiplying your time course, I have to tell you the reviews are the number one thing that supports this podcast. And me, it’s the best way to spread the word and get business tips and strategies to all those other women out there who need it.

So there you go. Two great reasons for you to go and leave a review right now. So go ahead and do it, send that screenshot my way, because I want to give you a free course. And thanks again for listening today. I’ll be back next Tuesday and I’ll plan to see you then.