Unleashing Grit: The Key To Success in Life and in Business

Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Danielle Cobo, where we are talking all about how to overcome challenges and achieve your goals. In this episode, Danielle shares her own personal experiences of this, as well as some wonderful tips and advice on how to break through the roadblocks that are stopping you from achieving your goals. Danielle is the best-selling author of Unstoppable Grit: Break Through the 7 Roadblocks Standing Between You and Achieving Your Goals, hosts the globally top-rated podcast, Unstoppable Grit Podcast with Danielle Cobo, and creator of the Attract Your Dream Job Master course. As an international keynote speaker, best-selling author, and podcast host, Danielle channels her expertise into her passionate mission: igniting transformation in others and helping them develop the grit and resilience to succeed professionally and personally.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST Why having a personal definition of success is key to overcoming perfectionism Why it is important to focus on progress rather than just the end goal The importance of aligning personal and professional aspirations for a fulfilling life If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or TikTok Listen to the Unstoppable Grit Podcast on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Buy the Unstoppable Grit Book Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook Transcript Teresa: Hello and wWelcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business podcast. How are you doing this week? So this week I have a really good conversation for you. I'm excited to talk to the very lovely Danielle and talk through her new book and how she overcame some of her challenges and how she achieves her goals. So Danielle, please welcome to the podcast. Danielle: I am excited to be here. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Teresa: I am excited about our conversation. I've been doing my research, having a look at everything, and I'm excited to see where it goes. I always leave these conversations very fluid and just let's see what happens. So I'm excited about that, but let's start by always by just explaining. How you got to where you are today? Danielle: Well, I, how I started in, I guess my life was, I was raised by a single mom. So I was raised by a mom who really embodied grit and determination and tenacity. She was, when I was younger, she was a single mom. I was, she was going to school full time and she was also, and then also Working as a server at night as well. So the combination between the three and she went from, we really went from nothing. We were in a one bedroom apartment. My bed was in the living room of our one bedroom apartment. We most of my clothes were on that thrift stores and they were on layaway. And I saw her go from nothing to rising in the corporate ladder working for one of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world. And she was a region manager in the 1990s for, so for a female to be a region manager and leading a team in the 1990s. With non as prominent as it is now. So, we've made a lot of progress but she really embodied grit and that was somebody that was a big role model for me and my life. Then I ended up falling in her footsteps. I spent 15 years in medical sales. I was an individual contributor role before stepping into a region manager role where I spent the past seven years leading a team for a fortune 500 company before breaking out into my own and doing speaking and coaching and. And writing a book full time. Teresa: Amazing. So that like I came from corporate as well, and I never had any intention of having my own business. Had it ever crossed your mind? Danielle: Absolutely not. I had no intention of starting a business. It's an interesting story because I, in 2020 was a very pivotal year for me and I believe it was for many of us. It was the great resignation is what that year was coined as. So in 2020, my husband had just returned home from serving a year deployment in Iraq. My, our twins at the time, our twin boys were two and a half years old when he came home and we were trying to navigate through this new life that we had. I had become very independent when he was gone. I was making all the sole parenting decisions, which as a parent, you know, we each have our own approaches to parenting. He had just come home from war, so there's, you know, some exposure to things that most of us don't, aren't exposed to. And so we kind of, it was a little challenging in the beginning with us trying to find a way to reconnect in a way for us to come together as a united family unit. And right as we started to find our rhythm. March 8th, I lost my mom and I lost her to suicide. And that moment when I heard the news, I remember collapsing to the ground and tears flooded my eyes and started to fall down my cheeks and my cheeks became flushed. And I just couldn't believe that my mom was in so much pain that she believed her only option was to take her life. Yeah. And as I'm trying to cope and even try to comprehend and understand what had taken place, March 13th, the pandemic, the global pandemic happened and the world shut down. So I wasn't even able to go home to go care to her things, to take care of anything, to be part of that healing process. And then. Lastly, I was working for an organization that I had been with for seven years and had just been acquired by a larger pharmaceutical company and it became a very toxic work environment. I had been with the company for seven years and I ended up deciding to leave. So all of this happened within a six month period and I felt lost, confused. I was having panic attacks on a consistent basis. I would just walk into the room and just start bursting out in tears because I had tied my identity to a paycheck to a title to this lifestyle that I had created and I'm going, what now? I don't know what's going on with the pandemic. Are we going to go into a recession? I don't have a job. My husband's come back from deployment. We're still navigating through that. And I ended up saying, well, I need to rebrand myself. If I'm going to be pursuing a job, I actually need to be more active on LinkedIn. And so I started to rebrand myself and people ended up reaching out to me and saying, I started to talk about career development and leadership and people started reaching out to me and saying, Hey, you know, I want to pursue this job, but I need help with writing my resume or interview coaching. And can I hire you as a career coach? I'm like, what is a career coach? I don't even know what one is. I wish I would have known what a career coach was back when I started my career. It would have been. Teresa: Yeah, maybe could have done one. Danielle: Yeah. I mean, it, well, it would have been really nice. I probably would have, you know, it would have been kind of helpful to have somebody to help navigate through the career when I started when I was 23 years old. So it evolved into eventually building this brand on LinkedIn where people started to reach out to me for coaching and speaking engagements and to work in their organization. And so that's how I started speaking. I had no intention. I, I basically went into LinkedIn thinking that I was going to really develop my brand so that I can position myself as a hireable asset to an organization. And I ended up being a hireable asset to many organizations. Teresa: I love that. Like that. I'm just trying to think about that time in your life. Any one of those things is life changing, you know, going through the pandemic was life changing for all of us to lose your your mom. I lost my mom during the pandemic. She didn't die of COVID. She died of cancer. But, you know, it's one of those cases where we didn't see it coming because we weren't seeing her. And And then obviously when she did pass away, there was rules around who could be at a funeral, how many, there was like nine of...