728: The More You Stand Out the More You Fit In with Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions

And it was not until after I became deaf, and I woke up one morning, and I realised I had two choices, I could continue to struggle, to continue to grieve, to continue to you know, fight this whole thing. Or I could embrace the journey, and I could stand out, I could choose to stand out. And ever since that turning point, I have chosen to stand out. #00:00:58-9#

#00:00:58-9# Neil (Interviewer): Hello, its Neil Ball here, thank you so much for joining me today on the Entrepreneur Way. The Entrepreneur Way is about the entrepreneur’s journey, the vision, the mind-set, the commitment, the sacrifice, Failures and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today – Karen Putz. But before I introduce to you Karen, I have a quote for you by Ursula Le Guin ‘The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself’. The Entrepreneur Way asks the questions so we all get the insight, inspiration and ideas to apply in our businesses. Karen welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of The Entrepreneur Way with us? #00:02:03-4#

#00:02:03-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I sure am. #00:02:03-4#

#00:02:03-4# Neil (Interviewer): Well thank you very much for coming on the show today Karen. Karen Putz is known as The Passion Mentor. She specializes in helping people unwrap their passions at any age through coaching, speaking, and workshops. She’s the author of the popular book, Unwrapping Your Passion, Creating the Life You Truly Want. For fun, she walks on water. Karen , can you provide us with some more insight into your business and personal life to allow us to get to know more about what you do, and who you are? #00:02:49-9#

#00:02:49-9# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Absolutely. I will share with your listeners that I am deaf. And we are doing this on podcast with the help of the signing interpreter who is signing everything that Neil says. So to back it up, I was born with normal hearing, and I grew up hard of hearing. And in school I loved the sport of barefoot water skiing. Until one day I took a hard fall, and when I climbed in to the boat, I had gone deaf. Only I did not know it at that time. I was struggling for weeks and weeks and weeks, at that time, I transferred to University. And as luck would have it, they put me on a floor with other deaf and hard of hearing people. So for the first time in my life, I was exposed to people who were signing. And I did not know any sign language at that time. So the real struggle for me at that time, but I learned to embrace the journey of becoming a deaf person. #00:04:01-7#

#00:04:01-7# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Fast forward many many years, at the age of 44, I got back on the water again, to the sport that I loved. And the reason why I am telling you that story is because thats what led me to my business today. I am known as The passion mentor. And I help people unwrap their passions at any age. #00:04:22-0#

#00:04:22-0# Neil (Interviewer): Wow. So when you say you help people to unwrap their passions, what kind of passions do you help people unwrap? #00:04:32-7#

#00:04:32-7# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Thats a good question. I think passion is a gift, the gift within us that are born with certain skills, abilities and talents, and we luminate for a reason. And I think the best thing for others to do is unwrap the gift within us. When we unwrap the gift of passion, all of a sudden we tap in to energy at a higher level than we ever have before. And if you think about it, what brings you joy? And when you focus on that joy, thats when you tap in to the energy of passion in your life. #00:05:11-2#

#00:05:11-2# Neil (Interviewer): How do you help people unwrap the gift of passion? #00:05:16-0#

#00:05:16-0# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I do that through workshops, through speaking, and through one-on-one coaching. I usually take people through the passion test process, I am a certified passion test facilitator. And I absolutely love the simple task within two sessions we can pinpoint, the top five passions in a person’s life and we can get on with focusing on that top five. #00:05:45-8#

#00:05:45-8# Neil (Interviewer): How does somebody know if they need your help? to find their passion?

#00:05:45-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I usually focus on people who are kind of sleep-walking through life, maybe they do not even realise it until something sparks them one day and they think, ‘oh my god there has got to be something more to life than this, get up, go to work, wait for the weekend, go on a few vacations.’ Repeat repeat repeat. So I help people work through that, so that they wake up in the morning, with a whole new attitude of doing things that bring them joy. Even if they are stuck in a job that they do not like, there are ways that you can shift your energy within your job, and start liking the parts of your job that bring you joy. #00:06:36-1#

#00:06:36-1# Neil (Interviewer): What do you enjoy most about what you do? #00:06:35-9#

#00:06:36-7# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I love that I can help people tap in to a whole different way of living. I will give you an example, I wrote a book called Unwrapping your passion. And I gave that book to a friend not that long ago. And she read the book and she did the exercises, and she discovered that long ago she had buried her passion for dancing. Right then and there, she signed up for dancing lessons. And I immediately got an instant message telling me how joyful she was to be having achieved something that she loved, so much that she had forgotton about it. And thats what drives me, being able to make an impact on someone so that they live a whole different way. #00:07:29-4#

#00:07:29-4# Neil (Interviewer): What drives you to do what you do? #00:07:34-0#

#00:07:34-0# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I think its a calling. I really do, I really believe that I was born to do this. I believe that the whole becoming deaf process as .. as it was, as traumatic as it was, it has bought me a different way of listening to people and connecting with people. So I really believe its a calling, a path and a purpose and its something that a gift that I have been given, to give other people. It sounds kind of arrogant, when I think of it that way, but to me there is no greater gift than to help someone else with something that they are struggling with. #00:08:19-0#

#00:08:19-0# Neil (Interviewer): Mmm in fact it would be selfish not to help people, if you can help them like that. #00:08:24-4#

#00:08:24-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Mm thats a good way of looking at it. #00:08:30-1#

#00:08:30-1# Neil (Interviewer): How do relax when you are not working in your business? #00:08:32-7#

#00:08:32-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: You know since really I love my work and it is relaxing to me to do it. But for fun, I actually built for water ski. I have re-found my passion for this sport and I took up competition for a while, and now I am doing 50 states for my fifties, so I am touring the United States, in barefoot water skiing in all 50 states. #00:08:59-8#

#00:08:59-8# Neil (Interviewer): So when you went back to water skiing after not doing it for a long time, and obviously after having the unfortunate accident, what did it feel like? #00:09:13-2#

#00:09:13-2# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: It was amazing. I was nervous, but the minute I put my feet back on the water, the old passion came flooding back. #00:09:26-8#

#00:09:26-8# Neil (Interviewer): Do you have any entrepreneurial role models? #00:09:26-8#

#00:09:26-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Oh I definitely do, Dan Miller https://www.48days.com/ he is the owner of www.48days.com. Many years ago, I took a workshop with him. And it was amazing, it was life-changing for me because Dan Miller, he helped me tap in to the passion of writing. My other two role models have been Janet Atwood, who is the author of The Passion Test. And Deborah Palmer who runs two successful chats. #00:10:12-7#

#00:10:12-7# Neil (Interviewer): Karen, you have told us a little bit about your personal life and you have talked about your business a little bit. What we are going to do now is talk about before you were an entrepreneur?
#00:10:25-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Way before that I got my masters degree in counselling. And I did that for a while. Then I stayed home to raise my kids for 15 years, and I taught part-time at a local college. Then I went back to work as a sales manager for a video phone company, and it was an amazing job because that was the job that really got me in to the people business. #00:10:59-8#

#00:10:59-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: The relationship business, building a sale, closing a sale, all of that I learned from my full time job in sales. So those are the jobs that set me up for what I am doing now. #00:11:17-3#

#00:11:17-3# Neil (Interviewer): What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business? #00:11:17-3#

#00:11:17-3# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Having the confidence to do this business solo, it’s always scary to do something that depends 100% that depends upon your skills and your abilities so for me that was frightening but I learned so much in the process and I learned to grow with the business…[Listen for More] #00:11:48-0# Neil (Interviewer): Did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business? #00:11:54-2#

#00:11:54-2# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Yes I think there were early doubts came from lack of experience. And then after 7 years going down this path, I learned to narrow things down to get more specialised in what I do and who I serve. And the more experience that I gain, the easier it has become. You know they say, practise makes perfect, that to put in those ten thousand hours become an expert, and that was the process of learning, evolving and gaining more and more confident. Especially speaking on larger and larger stages. #00:12:35-5#

#00:12:35-5# Neil (Interviewer): What do you speak about when you are on the stages? #00:12:35-5#

#00:12:35-5# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I speak about passion, it sounds corny but it applies to so many areas of life. Work and personal businesses, employees on every level that you can imagine, passion becomes fuel. So I tailor to my audience whether its women in business, or executives in business, I can tailor it to the audience that I am speaking to. #00:13:12-4#

#00:13:12-4# Neil (Interviewer): What mistakes did you make that slowed your journey? #00:13:12-4#

#00:13:12-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I think one of the biggest mistakes for me was not building up an email list from the very beginning. I have met so many people over the years that I could have had opportunities to grow that list, in different ways and I did not capitalise on that. If you build it they will come, and now I am realising, no you have to build it and invite them to come. #00:13:43-6#

#00:13:43-6# Neil (Interviewer): What are some of the things that you did before you started your business that would be helpful tips to some of the listeners who have not yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way? #00:13:55-4#

#00:13:55-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: You know one of the things that I definitely did right, was that I learned from the masters. When I first got back on the water, I learned from the word barefoot champion. And when I first started the business, I learned from people who worked this kind of business before me. So I always tell people, when you have indentified what you want to do, identify also the people who are 10/20 years ahead of you. And learn from them. The people who are actually living the life that you want to live, are some of your best teachers that you can tap in to. #00:14:41-6#

#00:14:41-6# Neil (Interviewer): Karen, what we are going to do now is we are going to move forward from the time before you were an entrepreneur, and talk about the time from you being an entrepreneur. Is culture important from the beginning in a business? #00:14:51-3#

#00:14:51-3# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Its absolutely critically important. Who you surround yourself is very vital to your own success. Who you choose to learn from, I think its very important to invest in yourself. Even before you invest in your business. Because the more knowledge that you have and the people that you learn from, they can shape your life in such an abundant way. That if you do that stuff it can really shape the way you do your business. #00:15:29-2#

#00:15:29-2# Neil (Interviewer): Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out, that would have helped you to short cut the learning curve? #00:15:32-1#

#00:15:33-1# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Do you know I would have started this business earlier, especially the writing component of it, I would have started it much earlier in life, because I identified that from the time I was nine years old. But I never stepped in to it, until probably my youngest child was three. And thats when I finally realised, ‘wow I need to tap in to that gift, so I wish I had looked at the gift that was in me earlier and recognised and honoured those gifts at an earlier stage. #00:16:20-9#

#00:16:20-9# Neil (Interviewer): How much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business? #00:16:23-0#

#00:16:24-4# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Intuition is a very big thing for me, many many times in my life it has guided me in the right direction. I have found that if I get so busy, I drown out that intuition, and then I lose my guidance. So I make time during the day to have meditation moments, to slow things down, to re-evaluate and renew what I am doing. I find that when I slow things down, thats when I get the most answers. #00:17:00-7#

#00:17:00-7# Neil (Interviewer): What makes you uncomfortable as an entrepreneur? #00:17:05-9#

#00:17:05-9# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I think the thing that makes me the most uncomfortable is dealing with the money aspect in a change of services. For me, I am a helper, I am a giver, so for me it has been an interesting process and learning to turn it around is an exchange of failure. So for me its been a learning experience to raise that money vibe of mine, and to recognise that the value that I have to give, is a change of monetary service. #00:17:39-2#

#00:17:39-2# Neil (Interviewer): And what do you think are some of the secrets to success? #00:17:47-5#

#00:17:47-5# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I think the secret to success are knowing who you are and how you can best provide value to people. I really think thats .. and success is also living life on your terms, and not somebodies pre-described life for you. If you want your business to be successful, you have to provide great value to your customer. #00:18:13-9#

#00:18:13-9# Neil (Interviewer): Life is made of constant change. whether we like it or not. And many people say that the only constant in life is change. Karen how do you try to keep up with change?
#00:18:27-9# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: You know what? I don’t. And it sounds kind of funny to say that, but what I have learned is that you really learn yourself by trying to keep up with change. In other words if you are trying to do all of the shiny new things that come up on that market. Or the shiny new things for your business, it can actually pull down your business. It is one thing to recognise what it is that you are successful at in your business and keep on and do tweak it. And ways will change, will bring in more profit, more customers, but you also have to keep a big picture in your life. Do we have enough balance? Do we have time for joy? Are you doing things that bring passion and joy in your life? Along with your business? #00:19:32-8#

#00:19:32-8# Neil (Interviewer): What is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership or motivation? Can you tell us why you have chosen it?

#00:19:46-3# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: My favourite book is called ASPIRE. By Kevin Hall and seven years ago, I came across this book and wow, it was life-changing for me. That book is based on 11 rules that you can live your life by. And many of the words I had never heard of before. And it was life-changing because it re-focused everything that I wanted in my life but also affirmed and woke me up to my gifts. I became friends with Kevin Hall and I took a re-tweet with him, and it was just simply eye-opening, I highly recommend this book. Because not only is it about business but it is also about life. #00:20:36-3#

#00:20:36-3# Neil (Interviewer): Folks, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in a time when you may be doing other things. Such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing, to choose your free audio book, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up, then you will qualify. Karen are you ready to speculate about the future? #00:21:10-9#

#00:21:10-9# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Absolutely. #00:21:13-3#

#00:21:13-3# Neil (Interviewer): Good. What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail? #00:21:21-1#

#00:21:21-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: You know I think thats a really hard question and I really struggle with it, because I need a place where I feel like I can do many things and I am enjoying a lot of the aspects of my business today. So, one thing I would do is probably, if I knew I could not fail, would be to get up in front of an audience of 20,/ 30,000 people and deliver images that brings hope, inspiration and passion to people. That would really rock. #00:22:01-0#

#00:22:01-0# Neil (Interviewer): What skill, if you were excellent at it would help you the most to double your business? #00:22:13-8#

#00:22:13-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I think for me it would actually be the skill of introducing my services to people that I do not know. It is still a scary thing to be able to, what I call picture yourself – but you do have to do that. You do have to put your book out there, your gifts out there. Your business out there, for people to be able to tap in to it. So if I could do that on a more efficient scale, that would be awesome. #00:22:39-1#

#00:22:39-1# Neil (Interviewer): In five years from now, if a well known business publication was publishing an article on your business after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say? #00:22:41-2#

#00:22:52-1# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I want it to say that Karen Putzjb is a person who truly mentors people, and brings out the passion within everyone. #00:23:05-5#

#00:23:05-5# Neil (Interviewer): We are now at the part of the show where you share your Three Golden Nuggets with us. Karen What is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

#00:23:17-9# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: The favourite quote of mine is actually a line from a movie called ‘what a girl wants.’ And the quote is ‘Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?’ And I love that quote, because for my entire life, before I became deaf, I wanted nothing more than to fit in with people who have normal hearing. And every day I felt sure that because I could not hear, and then it was not until after I became deaf, that I woke up one morning and I realised I had two choices, I could continue to struggle, to continue to grieve, continue to fight this whole thing. Or I could embrace the journey, and I could stand out. I could choose to stand out. And ever since that turning point, I have chosen to stand out to simply just embrace who I am, embrace my gifts, embrace what I can do. And to some people, that seems uncomfortable, weird, or maybe they have never met a deaf person before, and its kind of awkward for them, but I have found that the more I stand out. Its kind of ironic, the more I fit in. #00:24:41-6#

#00:24:41-6# Neil (Interviewer): Do you have any favourite online resources you can share that would be useful to other entrepreneurs?

#00:24:49-2# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: I highly recommend Dan Miller’s website, its called Dan Miller https://www.48days.com/ I have been a part of that website for a while and I have recently upgraded to a membership, and there are just so many golden nuggets there. About really taking a look at your life and your business and changing it in ways that are positive and are aligned with your path and your purpose. I just absolutely love that. As far as like an online tool, I am a writer, and because I have travelled so much, I needed something where I can tap in to. And for me, that has been press books, its an online website, in which I used to write my books. #00:25:40-3#

#00:25:40-3# Neil (Interviewer): What is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

#00:25:42-2# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Really tap into your joy, because when you tap into your joy other people can see that about you and your business and they want to do business with you because of that …

#00:26:02-5# Neil (Interviewer): Folks, if you didn’t manage to get a note of Karen’s favourite resource (or his favourite book) you can find the links on Karen’s show notes page. Just go to TheEntrepreneurWay.com and search for Karen or Karen Putz in the search box.
Karen is there anything that you would like to add about your business? #00:26:32-7#

#00:26:33-8# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: As far as my business, if you go to my webpage, I do have several free resources including outside the wake, and that book is about an older woman who literally changed my life and she could change yours with the wisdom that she shares in that book. #00:26:27-9#

#00:26:48-2# Neil (Interviewer): Karen, It has been an honour having you on the show today. Thank you for sharing your story with us, but also thank you for talking about your business, ageless passions. And also sharing some of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. You have really given usprovided some incite and perspective which is really useful. You have given us some great tips, and you have also given us some really good quotes today, one of the best ones today was when I thought you said, ‘the more I stand out, the more I fit in.’ Which is really thought provoking, so thank you very much for coming on the show today. #00:27:34-7#

#00:27:34-7# Karen Putz Founder and Owner of Ageless Passions: Thank you Neil, its been such a pleasure to be here with you. #00:27:38-1#

#00:27:38-1# Neil (Interviewer): You are welcome Karen, and thank you. #00:27:38-1#