Take Imperfect Action with Tracy Hazzard From the Law of Attraction in Action Podcast with Michele Joy

Many people get paralyzed from moving forward closer to their goals because they are always calculating and waiting for that next perfect move. But just how this world works, nothing is ever perfect, so why wait for something that may never arrive? Tracy Hazzard joins Michele Joy’s Law of Attraction in Action Podcast to share about how she let go of trying to be perfect, listen to her intuition, and just take imperfect action, leading her to a path of growth where things start moving and opening up for her. Sometimes, you have to start letting things happen in your world because the possibilities are always endless. Have the courage to take those imperfect actions as Tracy inspires in this episode.

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I’m bringing two people from all over the world and all walks of life who are here to share with you their journey on how they use the Law of Attraction and how it has made their life miraculous. Thank you much for joining me, everyone. I’m excited to share my guest. Her name is Tracy Hazzard. She’s Authority Magazine, Inc. columnist and host of The Binge Factor, which I was on, which is amazing. She’s the Cofounder of the largest podcast postproduction company in the US. As a content product and influence strategist for networks, corporations, marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, publications, speakers, authors and experts, Tracy influences and casts branded content with $2 billion worth of product innovation around the world. This woman is badass. Tracy, thank you for being on my show.

Michele, it’s my pleasure. I love your show, that’s why I interviewed you. It’s an honor to be here.

The one thing we said on your show, it’s like listening and it’s these great conversations. Every conversation that I have is literally a conversation and I love to have people share their stuff. I want people to shine and you are already the shining star, but you’re humble. I love it. The fact that you’re excited to be on my show makes me feel special. Thank you, Tracy.

I love it when I can reach people in whatever way it is. That’s how it works.

Please listen to her stuff. You will get all of her information after, but first Tracy, how did you come into the Law of Attraction and how has it changed your life?

I don’t think that I realized what that meant until several years ago. I didn’t understand that that’s how I was acting in the world and what I was doing in the world. Several years ago, I entered the entrepreneurial journey. While I had been an entrepreneur for many years, I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur. I thought I was just a business owner and a consultant. I didn’t think of it like an entrepreneur. I entered the entrepreneurial community on the funniest thing that happened. It’s one of those, exactly Law of Attraction moments where I had had a baby a year earlier. We had started our podcast. I thought I wasn’t getting good enough listeners. Evidently, I was doing fine, but I didn’t know that. I had no place to compare it to. We had lost a consulting client because we’re doing product design and they didn’t pay us. It was a mess. I was like, “Now I’ve got to get a new client.” It takes six months to scale them up and everything.

I was like, “We need a whole new method of lead generation in doing this. I have to do something completely different.” I went on my computer, went on Meetup and said, “What are local business owner meetings?” This entrepreneurial meeting showed up on my calendar and it was the next night. I live in Irvine, California, UCI at the university. I was like, “That sounds cool. I’ll show up there.” I get dressed nicely because normally I worked in my home office. I was in jeans and a shirt. I put on a dress, leave the house and go to this meeting that evening. As I get into the parking lot, I get a text from my husband that the baby threw up and I had my hand on the door and I’m thinking, “Do I go into the meeting or go back home and help with the baby? There’s a throw up. He’s a dad. He can handle it.” He is because he’s a great dad.

I was like, “I’ll go into the meeting. I’ll do twenty minutes because I’m here and I’m dressed up. If it’s terrible, I’ll leave. If it’s great, by the time I get home, the throw up will be gone and I’ll have a great story.” This is what I was thinking to myself. I go inside and they did a networking thing at the event. They said, “Tell us what you need next. What are you looking for?” I didn’t know what to say. No one in any part of my career ever asked me what I needed. That was my role. It took me by surprise and I said, “I need readers for my blogs and listeners for my podcast.” That was the only thing that popped into my head. Somebody said, “I have something for you. I have a referral for you.” It sent me on this journey of being a part of the entrepreneurial community. I didn’t become a part of it. I became a teacher and a mentor in it. It cascaded into all of this, but that was that source forced thing where it cascaded me into the world and then you find out about the Law of Attraction, The Secret. All of those things that I didn’t know about.

People need to understand that there’s no accident. You follow the breadcrumb. One thing I can tell about you, Tracy, you were absolutely a go-getter. If there’s an opportunity, you’re a yes person. Would you agree with this?

I’m an action taker.

You would know with your bio that you are an absolute action taker, but that’s the thing I love about the name of my show, Law of Attraction in Action. I wish I can find it. If someone reads this, then email me or if you know this, there’s another Secret movie and it’s not by Rhonda Byrne, it’s by someone else. It’s also a documentary and John Assaraf in it. I found it once on Facebook. I can’t find it since, but it’s out. On that, they said the Law of Attraction, The Secret didn’t work for a lot of people because they were missing the one component. That component is action. What I’ve seen with you, you’re a massive action taker, but it is also an intuitive hit like, “I don’t know why, but I should go to that.” Have you found yourself trusting that more?

I’m a very intuitive person, but like everyone, we had a massive setback in 2009 for us. For most people it’s 2008, for us, it was a little later and my husband lost his job one week before my other baby was being born. I thought I was having this miracle baby because my other one is fourteen years older than that. I thought I was having this final miracle baby that we’ve been waiting for a long time. I’m one week away from delivery and he loses this job. We are back to square one. Literally, I’m in the delivery room and we’re closing a job for us to do a consulting on a project. We tapped our network and did what we do. I’m on the table and closing a job that I have to deliver in the next week when I’m laid up at home. It’s my husband and I. It’s not me alone, but we are always partners. We work together. The two of us are going to have to figure out a way to deliver this job, but we needed the work.

That’s how we ended up in business. He had gone back and he’d worked for someone else, but we ended up in business again, but because of that harsh reality of it, and this need to take care of your family. This is something that may happen to a lot of people. That’s why I’m mentioning it. I contracted in and said, “I can’t trust my instincts. I’m not going to trust my intuitive sense, but at the same time, I’m a designer. I have to design products and it is an intuitive process.” I was allowing it on one side of my life, but I wasn’t allowing it on the other side. What happened was my business wasn’t growing. We were surviving, but we weren’t growing. It wasn’t until I took that step out to say, “I’ve got to trust my intuitiveness again and start letting that happen in my world that things started moving and opening up for me again.”

I love that you had that contrast. You had that bit where, “I can do it this one way where I’m not going to trust my intuition or I’m going to do it the ego way.” After a while, you’re like, “That doesn’t work. Let’s come back to intuition.” What happened when you started trusting your intuition more?

Take Imperfect Action: For designers, there never is a how path. There’s always a possibility that it won’t work out or it will have to reveal itself along the way.

Our business and products were taking off, everything was going well. I got asked to write an Inc. column. All of these things started cascading. We started our podcast because we thought that sounds like a cool idea. We would start taking action and doing the things that seemed like might have a path to success without saying, “I need a definitive yes, no, this works definitive measurement model. I need to know exactly how it works.” That’s also something we didn’t ever work within because we’re product designers. We’re always inventing something new. There never is a how path. There’s always a possibility that it won’t work out or it will have to reveal itself along the way. That’s part of the designer in me that has been doing that for many years. I understand that that’s okay to live in that where most people don’t, that’s an uncomfortable place for a lot of people.

That’s what stops people because they’re waiting for that big yes. They’re waiting for that definite, “Yes, this will work,” but that is not how life works. That’s what stops with people. I’ve talked many times how perfectionism is the killer to all success, if you try to be perfect. That’s why I think my show has been successful like you and I talked on your show because I did it. I waited for it and I pushed forward. I didn’t care if I didn’t know how to do it perfectly and it did not matter. That’s something I pride myself in because I’m such a big action taker, but you are times ten to me and I’m inspired by you. I also love the passion and also the hunger. Your husband lost his job and there was something within.

It came to me that in this time with the COVID-19, as everybody is in that struggle, maybe that hunger, they’ve lost their businesses, they lost their jobs. They’re like, “What am I going to do?” I want you to know what Tracy did. On the delivery table, trying to get this job going and it’s paid off. I’m all about following your joy and getting high vibration and get into alignment. There’s also a sense of having that courage to go even though you don’t know where it’s going to go. You just have to have the courage and you have that, Tracy.

You have to tap into something deep within you to say, “This feels right.” When it doesn’t feel right, trust that too. One of the very first articles that I ever wrote for Inc. Magazine was an interview I did with John Assaraf. It was such an interesting interview. I’ll tell you about it because he’s an interesting person. He had all these Post-it notes that stuck up to his computer in front of the camera. It was in his face. He can see these ideas he wanted to talk about. He must’ve randomly jotted them down. I didn’t prep him with questions or anything and tell him what we were going to talk about. He couldn’t have prepared, but it was his thoughts that he wanted to express. He had all these Post-it out there.

Finally, in the end, I asked him this question and I say to him, “I believe that I have a very deep-seated intuition. I’ve honed it well in my design business and I maybe haven’t honed it as well in my personal life as I should. I keep feeling maybe I’m missing something because I can’t clear my mind. I don’t do that meditation empty mind thing.” He said, “How do you hear your intuition?” I said, “My brain is noisy. If something rises up loud enough, I know that’s it.” He said, “You don’t have to do anything different. That’s your process. You have to wait for that sound. That’s above the fray and do something about it.”

I love that you’re sharing this because it is very individual. We all have our intuition. People say, “How do I know to follow inspired experts? I don’t know when I’m inspired.” It’s different for everybody. For me, I get excited. I’m jumping outside of my skin. I heard Wayne Dyer say that once, “When you’re jumping outside of your skin with excitement, then you know you’re onto something or something that you cannot wait to share with people, but you need to take action right away.” Another favorite book of mine is Mel Robbins, The 5 Second Rule. People know within five seconds, we lose our inspiration. Our ego starts chiming in, we’ll start to question things, and get out our pros and cons list. I’m all about like, “I will do it,” and then later I’m like, “What did I commit to?”

There have been scientific studies saying that we won’t make a better decision than we make within the first five seconds. If we analyzed everything and studied it for a month, a week or whatever that is, we won’t make a different decision that’s better. We will make it different based on those inputs, but our best option, our highest opportunity for success if it is, is the gut reaction that we’d have within our five seconds, because deep inside, we know what’s right for ourselves, we don’t listen to it enough.

We need to listen to our intuition, but again, taking that action is a big thing.

I know the opposite of it. I want to mention that my yeses are in my head. I will hear that, “This is the right thing. We should jump at this. We should try it. It will recur again and again.” That is in my headspace. I’ll wake up with that as a thought in my head, but my “I shouldn’t do this,” it’s in my body. I can feel tension and stress like someone’s not resonating with me, it doesn’t feel right and I will procrastinate. I’m not a procrastinator as you can probably tell, but I will procrastinate on responding to them or doing something. That is a sign that I’m reluctant, that I don’t know that I want to get in a relationship with someone, or sign this deal or do this thing. That is my cue. I’m stalling that is going on and I am purposely doing that without realizing it.

Do you listen to that or have you had situations where you didn’t listen to and you’re like, “Now I should listen to my body?”

I had a situation where we were going to enter in a contract with someone and something didn’t feel right about the contract. I struck a couple of paragraphs out of it and they thought I was crazy because they were like, “This is part of the benefit. Why don’t you want it?” It turns out five years later that the company completely went belly up. They are in government trouble and all kinds of things, but I’m not because I struck the paragraphs. You do have to listen to that. When I see that I’m doing that and I can feel the pattern happening, I’m like, “Why?” Sometimes I will override it because I was like, “I want the experience of learning something.” I am going into it with my eyes open that this is probably a mistake, but I want to learn why it’s a mistake. I at least have that and the analysis will kick in for me at some point.

Tracy, I also want to say, you know a lot of amazing people and a lot of amazing people in the Law of Attraction world. We were talking before, I said, “I love Lisa Nichols.” You’re like, “I know her.” Have you interviewed her before?

I haven’t gotten her on my show and I need to. She’s on my list of people I’ve got to follow up with and get them on, but I’m recording that and I was like, “I need to do it when I know I have time and can do it short-term and squeeze her in.” There are a lot of people like that. It’s one of those things. When you speak on a lot of stages, you come in contact with so many wonderful people. My favorite thing to do is to hang out after an event, whether it’s in the bar having a drink or wherever it is backstage somewhere, but hanging out and hearing what they’re working on and what they’re doing.

Did you ever expect yourself to be in this place?

I didn’t. I don’t think it was in my grand plan of like, “This is what my life is going to look like,” but it felt exactly right every time I made the choice. I’m never afraid to speak on a stage. I don’t have stage fright. I’m never afraid to turn on the microphone. These things all feel right for me. It was like, “Why didn’t you do this sooner?”

You do it because you love it.

The 5 Second Rule: Transform your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage

One of my favorite things is that I know that I don’t have to look at my stats. For instance, I don’t have to look at the number of listeners or the viewers or any of those. I know that there’s a person out there that reads this and got touched. All that matters to me is that I get on this mic and get on a stage. If one person takes some action from it, I’m in a good place.

You know what I love about you, Tracy, you are about other people. You want people to shine. I saw that when you interviewed me on your show, but also when I listened to your show, all the wonderful guests you’ve had on your show. You have this sense that you’re genuinely interested in people. That’s such a great quality to have. I’m proud of you and of your success. It also shows me and shows everyone reading how many things I bring up all the time in my show being that place of joy because you love what you do. Do it because you love it. Being imperfect about it, take action and follow your intuition.

This is a design process that I learned in school and I followed. It is the way that we go, but the design process is always thinking about those deeper questions within like, “Does this have to be like this? Why can’t the world be different?” We’re thinking about redesigning things or innovating and inventing. The first question is, “Why isn’t that possible?” When you live in that world, you’re already in a place of possibility. There are not all those gates. There’s not all that negativity. It doesn’t exist in the world of what I chose to do as a living, initially. Now, I hardly design anymore, but it’s still the same thing to me, whether I’m strategizing and designing a podcast show with a client. It’s still designing and it’s processing to me, but it’s living in a world of possibility.

“What does this look like? What does this feel like? Why can’t it happen? Why isn’t it possible?” Thinking about all of those things that that’s already set you in that place like you talk. It is joyful to me to be in creation. That’s my personal feeling. That’s why I’m here because I’m good at that. If I’m constantly creating, I can’t create everything and do it all myself. Sometimes my ideas are not mine, but my ideas are meant to be given away because they’re yours, I’m receiving it. From there, you have to take action steps. It doesn’t just happen. That’s what most people don’t understand how to do. They don’t understand how to take that action or what path to take in and you’ll take it wrong hundreds of times, but over time, that’s what we found.

You have the 10,000-hour rule. If you do it again and again, and it becomes instinct. It becomes muscle memory and you can do these things. That’s the way the process is for me. For us, I can’t even tell you what it is. It takes a lot of effort for me to analyze it, do it, and build a system and a team to be able to execute what I was doing on my own, but you have to do that as well if you want to scale and grow. The last part, and that’s what I think is key, I like The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. I love the section on value. At the end of the day, if there isn’t true value, you have to have an exchange, it’s commerce in the world. There’s an exchange of energy, money and in that process.

If you’re not delivering extremely high value in the world, it doesn’t come back to you. They don’t find you. We built our entire business. We have over 325 podcast clients and the entire business is built on over 90% of them coming to us because other partners that we work with, other podcasters, our clients refer people to us every single day. We don’t have a marketing process. We don’t have a sales process. We don’t have a funnel. It’s a referral basis. The other 10% probably come because they saw me on a stage, saw me speak somewhere and they reach out to us anyway. It’s still an outreach and a service part that drives back the value.

When you’re doing something you’re enjoying with, you automatically put out into the universe, into the world that like, “This is my passion. This is what I love.” People are drawn to that like flies to a light. They want to be near you because you love what you do and it’s apparent you love what you do.

It doesn’t come from a place of ego that, “I’m the podcast queen and the expert in something.” That is not what it is. In fact, I’m always learning. I’m always taking information. That’s why I interview you because you’ve got good information. I want to take that around, turn it and share it with my clients and the community. Coming from that place of genuine love for everybody else too, and want them to succeed. That makes it even easier to be joyful about what you do because it isn’t within.

One thing I want to point because I’m not sure at the end when we post this, when we are recording and everybody is in quarantine and in their homes. Maybe by the time this comes out, we’ll be out, but everybody is restarting their life. What advice would you give to people who are starting something new?

Restarting and pivoting are two different things. What I urge you to do is to not react negatively emotionally. There are things in your life that are working, that were working before, that will work again. They may be on temporary hiatus. We don’t want to throw everything out saying, “This is not going to get better.” We also want to remember, there are a lot of good things that we put into action before that we have to give it the right time. I find many people think of restart means like take everything out, throw it all in the trash and start again. I urge you instead to go and find 2% of things you can change.

You’re going to pivot yourself, but the trajectory is going to change tremendously. Go back and look at the things that were working. I made this analogy on a mentorship call. I was saying like, “We all go out there and we massively hoard and buy toilet paper, water, and all the things that we’re afraid will be gone tomorrow.” We do forget to look in our pantry. What do we already have that could be used? That we could generate business from? What do we have in our repertoire of things that could be working for us? Let’s not say we have to adopt something new. Much of reinvention and invention in my life and the true innovations, and I have patents on the wall, they’re all over the place. The most successful ones weren’t from innovating something where everything was 100% reinvented. It was a small shift in something, but that something was valuably different. It made the difference in the world and made a difference in the outcome, the difference in the sales for my clients. That can be the case for you too. Take a good look and sit on that and feel, “What did I love before?” It will come back again because that’s not going to go away.

We all need to hear that. Tracy, how can people get ahold of you if they want to learn more about all that you do? What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

TheBingeFactor.com is the podcast. That’s a great way to check it out and listen to it. You’ll be able to find all about me and stuff from there. If you want to reach out to me on social media, I’m a LinkedIn girl. That’s where I do answer my own messages while I do the others that you might not hear from me for a week or if you’ve messaged me on Facebook, but you’ll totally hear from me on a daily basis on LinkedIn.

Thank you, Tracy. This is such great advice. It’s something we all need to know. I’m glad there are people like you in this world who not only are successful in all that you do, but you’re genuinely loving. I can tell that you care about all of us.

Thank you, Michele. I love your show.

Everyone, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you have a story you want to share, I would love to hear from you. Go to my website at Michele-Joy.com. I hope you’re all having a wonderful day. I love you all so much and happy manifesting.

Watch the episode here:

Law of Attraction in Action
Michele Joy