Amanda McVicker (00:00)
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the OBM educator. So not only am I coming back from a little bit of a break, took a couple of weeks off, but it is 2025. Happy new year. I hope you had a great holiday season and you're coming back refreshed or if you're still technically on kind of your holiday break, I'm kind of in and out.
I hope that this has been a relaxing time for you to take time and reflect.
and start thinking about the new year. So I know sometimes that's not actually a really relaxing thought. But I love this time of the year to really kind of reflect on the past year, how things went, not necessarily like how it compares to what I wanted because I feel like
in the new year and we'll get to this in a sec, but in the new year, you you have a lot of goals and you have a lot of ambitions. And if you get to the end of the year and you're like, well, I did none of that, it can be a little depressing. can be a little demoralizing. So I like to take a look at what I accomplished in the past year, you know,
away from what it is I was wanting to accomplish because things change. Life happens. Goals change, right? Things that you might wanted to have done in the beginning of 2024 are not, are no longer in alignment with who you are at the end of 2024, the beginning of 2025. So take this week.
to reflect, but give yourself grace for.
any spot that you're in that is not necessarily where you thought you would be or where you wanted to be.
So today we're gonna be talking a little bit about kind of that reflection. So I do words of the year. I have been doing it for a few years now. And honestly, I might've done it back in my previous life when I had a nine to five, but I really don't remember. But I've been doing, a word of the year for how I...
how I want my year to go, kind of the theme around my year. And so in this episode, I'm gonna be reflecting on my 2024 word of the year.
and how it played out, where I saw it and what I did.
and how it guided a lot of my decisions. And then I'm going to share what my 2025 word of the year is and what I'm hoping to accomplish with that word in mind. So grab your favorite beverage.
and let's get into it.
So my word of the year for 2024, you're going to hear this and be like, I get it now, was educate.
And you can kind of get that from the name of this podcast that I started this year or last year, the OBM educator, right? So when I was entering 2024 and when I was thinking about what I wanted to be doing for the year, I was coming off of a year that I felt had very little direction. So in 2023, was kind of, I knew I wanted to grow
mentoring. wanted to
you know, help other people, VAs mostly, become OBMs. And that was kind of the main goal, but I really didn't have much direction in how to make that happen. A little backstory, I think it was the end of 2021 that I officially decided like, okay, I'm gonna add mentoring into
my services in addition to being an OEM, I want to help others. did strategy sessions, did free calls, all of these things. And then in 2022, I was really prepared to push it further, keep going, all of that. And then I became pregnant. I had morning sickness, all of that stuff. So I was dealing with that. And then I also had this really cool opportunity given to me.
to kind of put my toes back in, well not put my toes back, like dive head first, back into my old life as a conference planner. And in 2022, I was juggling being an OEM, being pregnant and planning a 2000 person conference. And so because of that, I really had to devote to mentoring.
to adding in anything else. was barely making it by with just OBM retainer and conference planning and being pregnant, growing a child. But then in 2023, I came off of my maternity leave. I took the last three months of 2022 off. Came off of maternity leave and I'm like, okay, we're gonna do this. And then I had a baby at home. I had a baby at home.
and I was coming back into the OBM things, all of my retainers that I had taken a break from. And I was postpartum, all of that stuff. And I really was aimless in what I was doing. I would get ideas on things I should do. Like, I mean, the idea for this podcast was years ago at this point, was like in 2023.
I was like, I really should start podcasts. I really should do a course. I should do a mastermind. I should do a membership. Like there are all of these things floating around in my head and I took action on none of them. had the ideas, but none of the motivation or direction to actually pull them off. And so when I got to the end of 2023, I was like,
Okay, rewind. What is the core of what I want my mentoring to be about? What is it that I...
want to do for VAs who are looking to become OBMs. And I know that my audience is a lot wider than that, but when I am creating content or I'm thinking about kind of the direction that is the main group that I focus on, the VAs who are becoming OBMs or wanting to become OBMs. So I was thinking like, what is it that I want to be doing for them?
And the answer that kept coming back was I want to teach them. I want to teach them how to become an OBM. I want to teach them the skills that they need. I want to teach them how to have confidence in themselves and in their skills. I want to teach them how to put on, but like create a successful OBM business. And you might have been hearing this, you know, around.
online space and all of this stuff, but teach and educate all of that stuff. They're no longer, those are not popular words anymore when talking about how you show up. And so when I was thinking about teach or educate or something like that as the word of the year, I had a lot of resistance to it because it was like, okay, but like people, people want more like in their mind.
They want a huge transformation that isn't necessarily going to become, but it's not going to come from simply teaching, right? They want something that's so much bigger. But then I would think about it more and I'm like, okay, but they still need that education, right? They don't need an entire certification. They don't need this huge, you know, tens of thousands of dollar courses, whatever type thing.
They just want to know like the basics of about being an OBM. They want to be taught the basics. And so once I really grasped that and, you know, told myself, okay, what you're thinking, like think about, I'm telling myself this, think about when you were wanting to become an OBM, what is it that you wanted? I didn't want some big transformational program.
I didn't want to get a certification. I wanted to just know what the heck all of these things were. And so when I was entering 2024 and I was looking for the direction that I wanted to go, and I was like, I want, I want to be the go-to person that someone goes to when they want to learn about being an OVM. And so that's where educate came from. and then it was very quickly, you know, after
the new year that I started working on my podcast and I came up with the name, I kept coming back to this theme around educate, right? I think I had like a few names in mind and they were all kind of around education. I think like the OBM primer, you know, like the old textbooks were called primers. That I was like, that might take a little bit of explanation.
But then I settled on OBM educator, right? And again, when I told my mentor about that, she's like, I don't know. Like that's really not sexy. Like I don't think people are going to tune into a podcast just to like be educated. And side note, dear listener, thank you for tuning into a podcast that is about being educated and proving that it is something that you
actually do want to listen to. And so that was a huge thing of 2024 of putting together this podcast, putting it out there and really stepping into the whole educate.
And then in addition to that, I was also able to put out my course for the first time this year. And again, I had been thinking about this for years at this point. It really was something that I had always wanted to do to put together a course. And honestly, my Google drive is just full of so many course ideas and outlines and all of those things. But I actually finally
put it out there and had students sign up and helped VAs who wanted to become OBMs, OBMs who wanted to just refine their skills and then people outside of the online space become OBMs and start their own business. And so I was able to support them and help them through the course, through education.
the course has a transformation in it.
of like growing your OBM business, but at the end of the day, it's teaching you something. You know, it really was education and I was able to do like group coaching and all of that stuff that really also like we went through specific scenarios, help people through their mindset and confidence, but also people were able to come to the calls and be like, so like we're having this DNS issue right now, like, do you know anything about it? And then I could teach them about.
DNS, which is not something that is taught in most programs. And so I was able to educate in so many different ways. And I think that, know, looking back now, like being at the end of the year,
looking back, I can say that that word really did guide.
what it is that I did in 2024. And I'm so thankful to my past self for, you know, deciding to be boring, deciding, hey, like.
deep down you realize that this is what people need and you need to go for it. Now, there's also like some personal things that, you know, played into the word of the year as well, because I do try and make it so that it applies to both my personal life and my business. And when I started 2024,
I was homeschooling my four-year-old, and I know homeschooling a four-year-old is like, just play with him. But we had taken him specifically out of daycare, and I was having him at home with me and my then 14-month-old.
and I had such grand plans of...
sitting down and doing worksheets and teaching him all his ABCs and numbers and all of these things. And that was actually something that did not really go according to plan. We didn't really have the structure needed for him to stay engaged in doing the schooling.
work picked up for me a lot too. And so that was something that, you know, the initial goal or idea of it, of educating at home really did not work out.
which is always a learning experience, right? You now I know that if we were two ever homeschool.
it would have to be a very different scenario and situation than what I let it be during this year when I had him at home. But another thing that I did is I went back to school. I started an MBA program in August. That wasn't something that I was intending when I thought of the word educate as my word of the year.
It's always been something in the back of my mind that I wanted to do, but I did not enter 2024 thinking I'm going back to school. But it kind of fits along the theme, right? And that's kind of, you know, when you have a word of the year and it's something that you think about a lot, sometimes things just follow the theme without you even realizing it.
I mean, I've had words of the year that I totally forgot about. I set one and then never thought about it again. And I got to the end of the year and I thought about it I'm like, wow, I actually kind of followed that, right? And so with going back to school, it wasn't the initial plan, but it followed the theme of the year of educate. So that is the reflection on...
2024's word of the year.
And I know this is getting longer than my usual episodes, but I'm hoping you'll stay with me because I'm really excited to share what I'm looking at for 2025. And in the same way I like to have kind of a duality of my word of the year and like personal and business.
This word does have a duality, although one side is strictly business and one side can be business and personal. And so my 2025 word of the year is reach.
The way that I always approach my words of the year is I start thinking about it in December and a word will pop into my head or I'll kind of like just be thinking something will pop in and I'm like, do I like it? Yeah, And if it sticks, like if I just, if I cannot get it out of my head, then that's how I know it's the word it should be. And so,
That's how it was with Reach. I was thinking, know, what is it that I want to be doing in 2025? And it was like, I want to reach more people. I want to expand my audience. I know that there are so many VAs out there who have the skills, have the...
the soft skills and the hard skills, but a lot of soft skills that are needed to be an OBM, but just don't know about OBM or don't know that it's something that they could pursue right now. And I feel like if my reach was bigger, know, I could.
introduce them to the idea of becoming an OBM. They could get my freebies. I so many freebies. They could get some of my freebies and start learning about how to make that transition. They could, you know, start growing their confidence, all of those things. And then they can make that switch in their business, right? It's like, it's always going back to, I want to help as many women.
make that transition from VA to OBM as I can. And, you know, I can put out amazing podcast episodes and all this wonderful content. But if no one sees it, no one listens to it. You know, it's just me talking to myself. And so that's like the purely business side of things. Like I want to expand my reach. I want to, I'm going to probably play around.
with ads and different lead magnets. I have a lead magnet coming out this month in January. It's ready to go. And I just need to put some finishing touches on like the landing page and stuff.
but it is so good. I'm so excited about it. But anyway, I want just expand my audience so that the message that I'm getting out there gets to more people.
But then there's the other side of it. So I am pretty safe person in the sense that I do not do much outside of my comfort in pretty much all areas of my life. Like starting a business was reckless for me, not really, but like when you think of things outside your comfort zone, starting a business, that was like crazy. I never thought of
would do that. But I normally am very safe in what I do. do not
push myself.
Again, I don't go out of my comfort zone all that much and I want to change that. And so that is the other side of reach, right? You you have the different definitions. So this one is like reaching out, reaching out of what I am used to in business and in personal life. So in business, what does that mean? What does that look like? That's gonna be like, I guess this does play into the other.
side of reach, but showing up more. I'm not always comfortable getting on camera. I'm not always comfortable sharing on stories. I sometimes feel, you know, like, what is the point? Who cares? All of that stuff. But part of going outside of my comfort zone is showing up more, putting myself out there being vulnerable.
but then it's also going to expanding.
what I put out there in terms of offers or content. Like instead of playing it safe with a course and one-to-one mentoring, like what are some new fun things that I could do? One of the new things that I guess, today is the second, it'll be launched next week. So you get first dibs on hearing about this, but I'm doing a workshop series this year.
and it's called like an OBM. And like it's educational, no pitching promotion or anything like that. Like you're coming to learn. But that's something that not a lot of people do. Like that's different. People are gonna see that and be like, I don't know. Like I'm skeptical because everyone's so used to being pitched at. So things like that.
what can I play around with? What can I that is unique and different? That might make people be like, that's weird, but will ultimately help the people who need it.
And then in my personal life, again, like just going outside of my comfort zone. You know, I was thinking, I do a lot of road trips with my kids and I, you know, sometimes do them solo and was thinking of like taking them down to Florida for spring break, which for us would be about a 12 hour drive, but to go like visit my dad and maybe go to Disney world or something like that.
I don't know, 2024, Amanda started getting scared about it. Even though I did it before in 2023, I started scared and like retreating of like, maybe I shouldn't do that. And then it's like, no, like reach out of yourself, go beyond your comfort zone, do things that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. so I'm going to be looking for opportunities.
that will push me outside of my comfort zone. Something that I did see in a Facebook group that I'm a part of, and maybe if I get a plan around it, could be interesting to do, but a year of rejections, right? Like the goal being to get, I think it was like 100 rejections in a year, because that means like you're putting yourself out there to actually get rejected, and the goal is to get rejected.
because you'll find that you actually get accepted to more things than you realize and you're actually putting yourself out there. That is going beyond your comfort zone. And so I think I'm gonna do something similar to that, maybe not 100, that will just push me outside of this kind of safe cocoon that I have kept myself in for the past couple of years.
So I'm really excited to see how it plays out. What comes out of 2025. I do have a lot of exciting things. Of course, the podcast is going to keep going. I am always looking for guests who wanna be on it. So the different type of guests that I have, OBMs who want to share their stories. The past two episodes that we had, did a little...
series on like a road to OVM where we talked with Michelle and Lily about their OVM journey. So if you ever want to come on and share what it was like for you to start your OVM business, what you overcame and how it is that you're doing now. it doesn't have to be like everything's perfect, right? No one's business is perfect.
But hearing other people's stories is so inspiring to others who are wanting to be there someday. And so if maybe you want to put yourself out of your comfort zone this year, would encourage you to reach out. I have a form in the show notes or you can send me an email or a DM if you're an OBM who wants to share your story. It's a really no fuss.
easy chill podcast interview and you can say it's your first podcast interview. But always looking for OVMs who want to share their stories. But I'm also looking for VAs or people who want to become OVMs who want to get coached. know, sometimes I'll do mini coaching sessions. If you want to reach out, love to chat with you about that. I love chatting with guest experts. So
Say you're listening to this and this was kind of Michelle's story. She is a website designer as well. And so we talked about website design, like if you and how it pertains to like being an OBM. If you have a topic that you want to talk about that would pertain to being an OBM, like social media or legal advice, taxes, bookkeeping, like whatever, and you happen to be listening to this episode.
Feel free to reach out.
You would love having more guests on the show, but I will definitely be keeping this podcast going. Thank you so much for being here and listening. You helped make 2024 amazing as the audience of the OBM educator has grown. I love seeing all your notes that you share about how helpful the episodes are.
hearing that you share it with others. If you are a listener and you would love to leave a review or like to leave a review, I really would love that as that helps get other people to listen and it'll help me with my goal of reaching others. So all of that to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening and I hope that your start to 2025 is amazing. I'll talk with you guys next week.
Bye.