29 Jul Guest: Marisa Mohi + Advice For Creatives + Work/Life Balance
My guest on today’s episode of The Causey Consulting Podcast is Marisa Mohi, a writer, blogger, YouTuber, and Tarot reader. She is the creator of several planners and journals as well as eBooks and course bundles. Marisa is currently working on a novel set in her hometown of Edmond, Oklahoma.
Key topics we cover:
✔️ Some of the limiting beliefs that hold people back from pursuing a creative career.
✔️ Marisa’s own entrepreneurial journey.
✔️ How can we achieve work/life balance as everyone is cloistered together during the pandemic?
✔️ Your family quality time is very important; guard it jealously.
✔️ To my knowledge, Marisa is the first Tarot reader on the show!
You can find Marisa online at:
https://marisamohi.com
https://youtube.com/marisamohi
https://instagram.com/themarisamohi
https://twitter.com/themarisamohi
Transcription by Otter.ai:
Hello, hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Causey Consulting podcast. I’m your host Sara Causey and I’m also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. Super excited for my guest today Marissa Mohi. She is a writer, blogger YouTuber and tarot reader. She is the creator of several planners and journals as well as ebooks and chorus bundles. Marissa is currently working on a novel set in her hometown of Edmond, Oklahoma. Sounds very exciting. So thank you for taking the time to be here today, Marissa. Yeah. Thank you so much, Sara. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So tell us more about your own entrepreneurial journey. How did you get started? Well, if I’m being honest I got started on accident, and it was never anything that I really intended to do. But in 2010, you know, we were still recovering from the Great Recession. And I was finishing up a master’s degree in writing, which, you know, at that time, the economy was kind of tender, I suppose. Yeah. And there weren’t a whole lot of opportunities for, you know, creative work or writers, where I lived in Oklahoma. And so I started doing just a little bit of freelancing. And it really started to pan out. And, you know, that year when I started freelancing, and you know, I did my taxes that year, when I was like, well, I really need to restructure to keep some of this money at the end of the day. And so I realized that I wanted to kind of move from Freelancer into making that a business and I mean, I had a bunch of full time jobs after that. But you know, I kept the freelance stuff going, and recently, I guess it was in December, I went 100% full time into my own business and IT Never anything that I thought I would do. Honestly, if you would have asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, you know, I’ll probably teach and you know, or work in a library or something like that. But this has just been something that is so much fun and it’s so fulfilling, and it’s, you know, 100% what I was meant to do. Oh, God, that’s such a good feeling. You know, when you really are able to say, Yes, I’m in my zone. I’m doing what I was put on this earth to do. It feels so good. Haha, great. And there’s so many creatives that don’t think that that’s out there for them because they’ve had nothing but you know, soul sucking jobs. So if you’re out there listening, it’s out there, I promise. So you work in particular with writers and I’d love to know more about your inspiration, like what gave you a heart for working with that niche in particular? Yeah, so I’ve always wanted to be a writer. That’s something that I was obsessed with. I guess when I was eight years old, I decided that that was, you know, going to be something that I did and so I majored in creative writing. I went to grad school for writing writing. And it’s just always something that I enjoyed. But also, you know, being an older millennial, I just kind of grew up around tech. And it never really seemed confusing to me. In fact, I would say I’ve probably done, you know, more free writing, you know, on my space, or live journal or places like that, where we all used to congregate back in the day. And so I just got really comfortable using stuff like that. And every time I would go to writing conferences, or I talked to my writing friends, I’d be like, we don’t understand how you can put out so much online content, you know, like, what is it that you’re doing? You know, how do you structure your time? How do you figure out what you’re going to do? And I think that I just kind of realized that there was a real need to teach writers how to build their online platform because I think a lot of writers get really stuck in like those esoteric philosophical conversations, and that’s what they want to write about. But at the end of the day, content creation can be difficult but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in motion. riders Don’t you know, have a budget to hire PR people or marketing people. So showing them easy ways to show up on Instagram or how to show up on their blog, or maybe even creating a YouTube channel, if that’s something they’re interested in. That’s just been, you know, like a fun way to work with them to help them and then also just to honestly create passive income products because I can create a framework in a planner and then pass it on to another writer, and that writer can then use that and I can sell that multiple times. So it’s just been, you know, I think it almost feels like it was all meant to be if that makes sense. No, definitely. Yes. And you touched on this a second ago and I’d love to learn more about it. So in my coaching practice, there are times when I encounter limiting beliefs around pursuing a creative outlet. Like people think it’s self indulgent, that when really gets under my skin, you know, I hear somebody say, Well, I’d love to be a writer or sculptor or painter, but I feel like it’s self indulgent. Like somehow I have so survivor’s guilt if there’s so many people, like you know, one of my podcast guests earlier, Scott Grayson called it being a cubicle zombie. There’s so many people who are stuck in that nine to five rut, their cubicle zombie, you who the hell am I to escape that rut and be able to paint and get paid for it or be a writer and get paid for it? So we have to work on shifting those limiting beliefs around it’s self indulgent, it’s wrong. I’ll never make it. What are some of the limiting beliefs that you see as you’re working with writers and creatives? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot with writers and I’m not necessarily sure where they come from. But what I hear a lot is, I’m just not techie well, but you don’t necessarily have to be techie anymore. You know, you can grab yourself like a Wix website. And it’s almost impossible to make it look bad because it’s such a user friendly thing to use in the first place. And I think just this notion that there are two Too many barriers to entry around technology or around social media. And you know, there are some barriers, they’re always going to be there. But if there are already a bunch of people doing it, you know, I think that it is something that’s a lot easier than a lot of people think. And so, I hear a lot, you know, that I don’t understand the technology, or I just didn’t grow up at the same time that you did. So I can’t learn this, but like, I’ll be real. I didn’t come out of the womb doing YouTube, you know, I came a lot later. So, and I always think of it, as all products now are designed to be as user friendly as possible. And yes, there’s going to be a learning curve, but just know that, like, there’s so much tech support out there. There’s so much, you know, so many resources and a lot of information about how to use stuff. So these platforms really want you to use them. So they’re gonna make it as easy as possible. So I think that that’s the biggest limiting belief I hear like, I just don’t understand technology and I mean, I understand it, but also it’s 2020. And we’re not getting rid of computers. Yeah, that’s a really good point to that like, okay, even millennials and Gen Z young people, it’s not like they were sitting as a fetus in the womb with a cell phone. Like, at some point, everyone has had to learn how to use technology. And and I agree with you, they a lot of these platforms like Wix and WordPress and GoDaddy, like, they really do want to set you up for success so that you will continue to use their products and renew your license every year. Like they’re not setting you up to fail. They’re setting you up to succeed. Exactly. And I think it almost comes down to like a time management question. It’s not that you’re not techie. It’s that you don’t want to set aside the time to learn something new. That’s very well said yes, I agree with you. I like that a lot. And I noticed that you are really passionate about work life balance, especially in this time that we’re in in the past. Dimmick people are like all cloister together in the home, you’ve got kids that are having to be homeschooled for the first time, you have parents that are trying to continue to hold down jobs and do zoom meetings every five minutes and then take care of the kids. And so there’s just all of this sort of frenetic activity that’s happening within the home. So where where do we even begin? Like when we think about work life balance in this sort of new normal? Where do we even start? That is a fantastic question. And I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer, but I do have, you know, some small things that you can do. So, I have always been obsessed with work life balance, and I think it was because that, you know, for so long, I had a full time job and a side hustle, and like little creative things that I wanted to do. So I had to get really good at time management. But I also had to come to terms with, you know, understanding that I couldn’t do every little thing even though I tried several times, you know, yeah, and I always jokingly tell people I’ve been burned out since 2002. It’s probably not true, but I do, you know, toe that line more often than I should. So I’m trying to get a lot better about it. And that’s kind of where my work life balance obsession comes from. So for me, I turn off as many notifications as possible. And I know that a lot of people will say, you know, you can just put your phone on Do Not Disturb after work hours. But that doesn’t work enough for me. So I, you know, keep all my notifications off, except for alarms. And then I’ll set specific alarms on my phone, like, at 8pm every night and alarm goes off, and I put my phone in my home office, and I do not touch it anymore. I mean, that’s an ideal scenario, I will be real sometimes I get sucked into Instagram scrolling, but I’m trying to get better about it. So nobody’s perfect. And so little things like that. Or my fiance and I have this kind of, I would say it’s more of a routine now where we try to take a happy hour every day. Not so well. If the weather’s nice enough, we’ll sit outside and you know, have a drink and just I try to hit that by 6pm. Sometimes we’re not finished working by then because we both work for ourselves. So you know, things can take as long as they want. So you have to actually make yourself go outside. And then you know, just kind of making time for working out. That’s something that has really kept me healthy and sane right now, just because you know, the gyms are closed, and there’s just not a whole lot of places you can go right now. So just working out every morning in my living room. I do it before everybody wakes up, and it’s just nice and chill and quiet. And it’s like my little alone time and then I shower, make coffee and then get to work for the day. So just kind of having these routines and these habits in place has made it a lot easier for them to find that sense of balance. I will say that, you know, I’m still struggling with laundry. You know, we cannot keep up with the dishes because we’re never going out to eat anymore. Ya know? I don’t have answers for those but I’m always happy to hear people have suggestions about Yeah, and I really like your point about having that intentional, happy hour as a couple because tasks do expand or contract to fill the time that we give them. So, like when we are self employed, or we own a business like yes, you could you could sit and be an entrepreneur all night long. You could miss out on a real time. Yeah, yes. And so like, if you don’t have that intention of like, okay, at 6pm, we’re going to go out on the patio, or we’re going to, you know, hang out by the Fireside, or whatever, and like, have a glass of wine and really have togetherness time. Like, I think it works a lot better if you just say like this is this is I’m going to speak it into existence. This is going to be how we spend our evening tonight. And we’re going to shut the phone off long enough to have that quality time with each other. It’s so important and then once it becomes a habit, it’s so easy to keep doing it. So yeah, just making it a priority for a week and then you’ll be in that groove and then you can just keep doing it. Nice. So I have to say you have a unique skill set and writing, blogging, YouTubing reading tarot cards. How do you like, find that you can integrate all of these components together? Like how do you achieve all of this in your entrepreneurship and then in your work life balance? I mean, you’re I, to my knowledge, you’re the first like, sort of mystical tarot card reader person that I’ve had on the podcast, which I’m super excited about. So it’s like, how do you gel all of these unique qualities together? Yeah, so that is a great question. Um, I don’t know if they’re necessarily jelling, sometimes. Some things feel like they don’t work. But I think that’s when you kind of have to smooth over the edges. So I wrote this book called body of work by Pamela Slim. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. But it’s kind of just about finding all the things that you’re interested in and using those things, to build basically your job and your platform. And I’ve always been interested in Tarot. And as somebody that studied writing and story structure, it makes a lot of sense to me because you know, the cards when you lay them out, you look at the pictures. And it basically follows standard story structure, if you are familiar with the hero’s journey and stuff like that, yeah, so yeah, just like looking at those you can kind of see it lay out that way. And then there are a lot of writers historically, like Sylvia Plath did those who use Taro and big boards to like come up with their story ideas. And I think I kind of want to bring that back. I don’t know if I can, you know, make it a whole big movement or anything like that. But I think that, you know, kind of consulting, maybe spiritual guides in order to write better or to come up with better ideas. Maybe that’s something that we’re kind of lacking now. Because online in the writerly space, anybody that talks about writing, it’s always about productivity. It’s about hitting your word counts and like being productive is super important. I won’t say that. It’s not but at the end of the Today, it’s not the only goal like getting work done and moving on to get more work done isn’t always the most important thing. And I feel like if you are a creative entrepreneur, you get that one special blessing of doing creative things the way you want to do them. So just kind of following what lights you up what you’re interested in what excites you, and then just kind of integrating that into your daily life is the best part about running your own creative business. So I’m always into like, you know, weird, esoteric, spiritual things. And so I try to incorporate them into everything I do. Oh, yeah, I think that’s so cool. And I love the way that you’re talking about this because it is so important to have those things in your life, not just like, okay, so sometimes in my mind, we tend to think about this in our personal life, like, Oh, I have these hobbies. I have these things that I really enjoy doing for fun, but then I go to work and it’s like, you can hear you don’t hear the music in the background like huh I like it, it’s wonderful when you’re able to enjoy all of it, like, you don’t just have this, like, oh, I’ve got this amazing personal life or I’m in this fulfilling romance or this very happy marriage and then or whatever, you know, and when you’re able to integrate these things together so that it’s like, Yay, you know, I wake up in the morning, and I really feel good, I feel fulfilled, I feel exciting for what’s about to happen in this day instead of dreading it. So I, I think being able to live a life that lights you up, instead of having like, well, I’ve got a couple of compartments over here that are, you know, on fire and exciting and then the rest of it’s kind of a dumpster. It’s on fire because it’s a dumpster fire like, right, it’s very fulfilling, you know? Yeah, it’s so nice to be able to enjoy what you were doing, even if it’s like the hardest part of your year, like every year for me doing taxes. Yeah, you know, preparing uncinate to my accountant. It’s awful, but at the same time, I’m so happy I get to do that because it means that You know, my business is working and that I get to continue this lifestyle I have so I think when like everything when you’re when you’re following your heart, you’re doing what you love and pursuing it and you know being compensated for your time. And I think that it just makes it so much easier to endure all those, you know, hard, terrible things about being a business owner, well said. So if somebody is listening to this episode, and they’re creative, or a writer and they want to reach out to you learn more about who you are and what you do, and potentially work with you, where should they go online to find you? Yeah, so you can always find me at MarissaMohi.com or youtube.com slash Marissa Mohi and I’m on both Twitter and Instagram as at to be Marissa Mohi as well have a Facebook page but I’ll be real I’m not super active on Facebook. So if you message me there, it might take me a minute to find it. Cool, very cool. Well, I know that you’re busy and I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to be a guest. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is awesome. Once again, my guest today was Marissa Mohi, you can find her online at Marissa Mohi -marisamohi.com. If you enjoy today’s episode, please share it. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now.
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