Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Hailey Patry, Founder of The Lifted Lid, located in Oakville, ON, Canada.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

My business as a coach, speaker, facilitator, and author, is "Hailey Patry" – The Lifted Lid, at www.TheLiftedLid.com. I am known as Your True Happiness Coach, Marriage Mentor, and The Happy Business Coach. I offer a blend of coaching, consulting, counseling, and mentoring to the couples, individuals, and business owners that I coach privately. I also facilitate workshops, deliver keynotes, and do corporate group coaching. I support clients in three major areas, which are happiness, relationships, and success.

In the area of happiness, I support clients who are challenged by depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma, grief, transition, low confidence, or issues with self-worth and body image. I do a lot of work with clients who feel overwhelmed, stuck, lost, and frustrated for long enough… so they are ready to finally take back their power, design the lives they want, become the version of themselves they've been dreaming of, and raise the quality of their life on all possible fronts. I especially love teaching clients how to step into confident, assertive, authentic versions of themselves, living lives they are proud of.

When it comes to couples, I absolutely love helping them fall in love with each other all over again and redesign their marriage or relationship in just 90 days. I have a specialty in infidelity and trauma, so when couples have lost their way… I help them find their way back to healing, back to connection, and back to each other. It fills my heart with so much joy to watch the spark and intimacy come back for couples who have lost it for a very long time. It's beautiful to see the love return, especially when couples are on the brink of breaking up. I teach my I.D.E.A.L. Love Method and the 6 Secret Skills of Happy Couples… which include a lot of great techniques for having amazing communication.

And finally, when it comes to success coaching, I work with business owners and companies to solve people's problems that get masked as business problems. I help business owners and executives with their confidence, communication, time management, organization, productivity, assertiveness, leadership, emotional well-being, goal setting, plus much more. My clients come to be because they are frustrated yet very motivated to create breakthrough results, but they feel overwhelmed and stuck, so they know they need support. I also love to help you connect your self-worth to your net worth and figure out what's been holding you back in your life, relationships, and work… so you can lift the lid and stand proud of who you are and what you're creating.

Honesty, often, clients come to me because they think they need one of the three areas of support… happiness, relationships, or success, and then we realize they actually would benefit from all three. It's a beautiful thing for clients to have one safe space to share their challenges and goals and not have to make three appointments a week for marriage counseling, therapy, and a business consultant. I am a hybrid of all three, so they get to save time, energy, and money and get it all worked on holistically.

It's truly an honor to serve my incredible clients and to watch their lives, relationships and businesses transform.

Tell us about yourself

I am a happily married mom of three neuro-diverse boys, who have a long list of challenges, and I love them all to bits. When I am not serving my amazing clients, you'll find me loving up my family, and spending time together in nature, no matter the season… from hiking, biking, sports, and kayaking to tobogganing, snow tubing, and skating… we believe that families who play together, stay together.

I do what I do for work because it is my life's mission and purpose, and I was called to this work with my own life journey. My mission is to decrease the amount of depression, heartache, divorce, and struggle in the world and to increase the amount of joy, confidence, love, and success in the world.

I was picked for this. I started out where my clients start… in a deep struggle. And I believe that the greatest act of leadership is to personally first try, fail, fall, get up again, succeed and then teach others exactly how they can too. I overcame an abusive and challenging childhood, which led to 8 years of depression and anorexia, from the age of 8-16, along with self-harming, two suicide attempts at 16, and a violent attack at the age of 17 which led to cervical cancer and reproductive/reconstructive surgeries. With my damaged self-worth at the time, I entered into my first marriage ill-equipped to make better choices for myself, and once I did the work on myself and raised my self-worth, I left that marriage for mine and my son's safety, escaping domestic violence. It wasn't until the age of 30 that things really started to turn around for me, and I have made it my mission to help as many other people as I can to turn their lives around too. I am so blessed to be lovingly married to my second husband, who has been raising our teenager for 13 years and has legally adopted him. Together, we created our two younger sons, who at this time are almost 7 and 8.5.

What gets me up every day to serve my clients is my own remembering of how hard it can be, but also how sweet life can be when we have the tools and the right support. I want to give the gift of happiness to as many people as I can. It's what I was born to do.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Honestly, this is a tough one to answer because there are so many things I am proud of and so many clients that I am over the moon proud of for their transformations and accomplishments. But if I had to choose one thing, I guess it needs to be this:

I have designed a work-life balance reality that actually amazes me, especially because of how hard our life is right now with our son's special needs. I think it's my biggest accomplishment to run a successful business in less than 28 hours a week, raise three boys with tremendous mental health challenges, show up 100% for my clients, and also show up 100% for my family and maintain a happy, loving marriage. People who really know me and know how painfully hard our situation is, ask me "how we hold it all together and still smile." It's certainly by design and not by accident, and these same techniques for designing beautiful lives, even in the face of great adversity, are what I love to teach my clients.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Knowing the difference between working IN my business and working ON my business. I think that many of us, as business owners and entrepreneurs, get easily bogged down in the minutia of the day-to-day, and we can fall prey to incoming notifications, putting out fires, and letting other people command our time. But this is a crucial lesson that I first learned and now teach: We need to include all our working hours when we plan to win each 168-hour week, each month, each quarter, and each year.

That means we need to account for and set aside the time to work ON our business as well… which includes masterminding the challenges, planning for our goals and visions, tweaking and pivoting as required, and working on ourselves because our businesses deserve us to be operating from a "full cup" and good emotional well being. There's a difference between replying to emails that take our ATTENTION… and casting our vision and making our plans for the next 90 days, one year, and three years, which requires our INTENTION!

How can you tell when you are working ON your business? You're CHOOSING to focus on your INTENTIONS and create the results that matter to you. Even if this means you need to hide in a cabin or hotel for a few days in your PJs to get, your thought work done. It's well worth it!

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Be brave and generous in your story-sharing. The more you tell your dream clients about WHY you do what you do, beyond just WHAT you do and HOW you do it… the more you will be irresistible to your perfect clients wanting to work with you. People need to know your heart, your mission, and your why. The cliché quote is true: People don't care how much you know until they know HOW MUCH YOU CARE!
  2. Be a unicorn. Be different. Find the way that you'll do your craft in a unique way that meets the needs of your clients, unlike anyone else in your field. For example, unlike most traditional clinical therapists, who see their clients only in session, or in rare cases, they offer limited email contact… I offer my 90-day coaching clients UNLIMITED EMERGENCY TEXT SUPPORT in between all their sessions so they are not alone when they need help the most. What can you do to offer extra value and a wow factor for your ideal clients so that they don't need to look anywhere else and feel right at home hiring or buying from your company?
  3. Have a deep, meaningful, and loving relationship with your calendar. I won't judge you whether you prefer a paper calendar, agenda book, online system, or some cool hybrid system… but no matter how you slice it, you need to have a beautiful relationship with your schedule. If you also value having a work-life balance while you start, scale, and grow your business, then I recommend the following order for scheduling:                                   First, make time for your self-care, and second, your relationship if you have one or want to have one. Third, make time for things that give you joy and light you up. Fourth, put your work hours in your calendar, and I mean both the time you work IN your business and ON your business. Lastly, schedule in some white space so you have some protected time for when life throws you a curve ball (because it will), and you may need that space for something important. And if you have any time remaining, schedule the chores and admin you want to do in your life, or delegate or hire out for the things that simply can't fit into your schedule. You deserve a life of balance, and it won't happen by accident. "Live the life you love, and love the life you live."

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.theliftedlid.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/haileypatry/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haileypatry/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hailey-patry-theliftedlid/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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