How I Made $24K While My Life Was Falling Apart (The Truth About Selling Through Hell)

Welcome to Sold Out Sales School, the podcast for women with heart led impact driven offers who are tired of being the Internet's best kept secret.

I'm Trish Ware, mom of seven, former labor nurse turned seven, figure business owner and business mentor for B2C brands.

If you're marketing to moms.

Parents or real people who are not gonna make money off your offer.

This show was made for you.

You tried the big name coaches, but their strategies weren't built for your audience.

Here we do sales differently.

No bro marketing.

No cold dms, no weird hooks.

No fake urgency, just clear messaging aligned offers and strategy that actually converts.

You are not here to hustle harder and miss all your family events.

You're here to scale smarter with simplicity.

So let's get you sold out.

I am about to tell you.

The most vulnerable story I've ever shared on this podcast, and by the end of this episode, you are going to know exactly how to keep building your business.

Even when your entire world is crashing down around you, and there may be tears just saying that, but picture this, I'm working full-time as a labor and delivery nurse, homeschooling two kids with a 4-year-old who needs constant attention, and I just peaked at my ex-husband's phone and discovered that this person who.

I had trusted my life and my children's life into his hands was not only cheating on me with multiple women, mind you, but doing things behind my back that I can't even repeat on this show.

But here's what nobody tells you about rock bottom.

It's actually the perfect I, I'm trying not to cry right now.

It is the perfect.

Soil or foundation to build your empire, and I'm gonna prove it to you with my story, and I'm gonna give you the exact three step framework I used to go from having my car declined at Walmart to launching a $24,000 birth course.

Even if you've never been through a divorce, even if your life feels stable right now, even if you think you could never build something when you're emotionally destroyed, stay with me because what I'm about to share will prepare you for any storm that life throws at you, and more importantly, it'll show you how to turn your pain into your greatest business asset and advantage.

Now, don't worry if you are thinking Trish, I can never be that strong.

I think that I thought the same thing about myself.

It's so hard for me to imagine now because now I know I am, but I'm gonna break down exactly how I did it step by step so that you can too.

Let me paint the full picture of what my life looked like during this time because I need you to understand just how impossible my situation seemed.

I was working 12 hour shifts as a labor and delivery nurse, and if you've never been a nurse, let me tell you, especially being a labor nurse, it's physically and emotionally draining on a good day, and I. Would come home exhausted only to immediately switch to checking on homeschool teacher.

My days off, I'm homeschooling my kids and we're talking math lesson science experience.

My daughter was getting ready to graduate.

All of these things, the whole nine yards, and my youngest was four.

Grayson was four at the time, and.

We all know this is where they need constant attention and have endless energy.

And I was an older mama at that.

I was 42 when I had him.

So even when you're running on empty, I'm talking to you.

Anyone who's parented a 4-year-old knows they don't care if you just worked 12 hours or 18 hours.

They want snacks, they want stories they want.

You.

They want you present.

And I had this dream brewing inside of me, this version of creating my birth education content to help other mamas have empowered birth experiences.

And I wanted to share everything I'd learned as a labor nurse.

And I was sick of seeing women bullied, and I had this passion inside of me.

It was still a dream and I wasn't making any money from it yet, but I was working my tail off on the in between, like getting up super early, staying up really late, and you know, I was a nurse with really big dreams and very little time.

Then came the day that changed everything.

And I won't go into all the details because some things are really, really personal, but I discovered, obviously, I've told you already, that the person that I had address my life in was living a double life.

And the betrayal wasn't just emotional, it was financial.

It was about our family's future.

And I would go on to find out even worse things, and it was.

Everything I thought I knew about my life and who I was as a wife and a mom like came crashing down and suddenly I wasn't just a busy mom dreaming of something more.

I was a single mom.

Facing court battles and legal fees and the terrifying reality that I might lose everything I worked for.

And most people would have given up on their dreams right then and there because I had this paycheck.

I could clock in, I could do, I was a travel nurse even.

I could go be, you know, take a travel sign and make insane money.

And most people would've said, I need to focus on survival mode right now, but here's what happened that changed everything.

For my story, there was this moment, and I'll never forget it and it's going to sound so mundane, but it was actually the most defining moment of my.

Business career, I guess my life, I had just worked an 18 hour shift at the hospital, my regular 12 hours, but then I stayed over for an extra six hours because we were slammed and short staffed.

And I was like, yeah, I'm exhausted.

I'm running on fumes, but I need, you know.

I need this.

And so I did.

And on the way home I had to stop at Walmart, which by the way, Walmart is sketchy in the middle of the night, by the way.

So I stopped to get some groceries because I knew we didn't have anything for breakfast.

And I go to check out, I scanned everything.

And when I go to pay.

My card gets declined.

And this wasn't because I was irresponsible with money.

This was because my ex-husband who had asked me for another chance and I was actually praying about it, had decided to get his own bank account and pulled all her money out and he didn't tell me.

So I'm standing there in Walmart checkout line, holding the groceries card, declined.

That was my rock bottom moment.

And I was like, hell to the know this will ev never happen to me again.

And it hasn't.

But here's what happened in that moment that changed everything.

I had this choice to make right then and there.

I could either let these circumstances define my future, or I could use it as fuel to build something bigger than I ever imagined.

And there's a Bible verse I love that says that God can do more than you ever hope or imagine.

And that's when it hit me.

And this is the first key principle I want you to write down.

Write this down.

Grab your pencil.

Your circumstances.

Don't determine your capacity to serve others.

So think about it.

When you're going through hell, you develop a level of empathy and resilience and authenticity that you simply cannot fake.

And people can sense when you've been through the fire and come out refined.

That's what fire does.

It refines you.

That's what it does when you know when.

Uh.

Person is using fire to refine metal.

Oh my gosh, I'm blanking right now 'cause I'm so emotional.

But here's what most people get wrong.

They think they need to wait until their life is perfect to start building their business.

And that is backwards thinking.

The truth is your mess becomes your message.

Your test becomes your testimony and your pain becomes your platform, and I decided right then and there in that Walmart parking lot, crying my brains out that I was going to turn my dream of helping other mamas into a real business, not someday, not when life got easier.

Right now in the middle of this hot, stinking mess of mine.

I was gonna treat it like a real business.

And this is crucial.

You can't just show up and dump your trauma on your audience.

My audience knew that I was going through something, but they didn't know what, and there's a strategic way to do this that actually serves your clients better while building your business stronger, and that is the key.

So number one, separate your personal storm from your professional purpose and, and that's what I learned the hard way.

You have to create what you call sacred business hours during the court proceedings, during the hell I went through later, which is a whole nother story on top of the first story.

But I made a rule for myself every evening after I get the kids from to bed.

From about eight till like midnight, I was a hundred percent focused on building my birth education business.

Not my legal drama, not my ex-husband's latest stunt.

Not the court dates looming over me, not the fear that wanted to consume me.

And this wasn't about pretending everything was fine.

This was about honoring the commitment I made to the mamas who needed what I had to offer.

'cause they so believed that the birth culture had to change.

And even though I hadn't met them yet, I loved them.

And I remember one night I was working when I got a message from my lawyer that made my stomach drop.

And it's the kind of news that makes you wanna crawl under the covers and never come out.

But I had a choice.

I could let that text derail my entire evening and my progress, or I could compartmentalize and keep building and I chose to keep building.

And you know what?

That night I created some of my best content and that Instagram content that I created that night ended up being a catapult to my growth.

And that would later help thousands and thousands of mamas have more confident births because I didn't let the enemy win.

And here's the thing, those future students had no idea what I was going through personally.

And that's exactly how it should be.

Your audience isn't paying you to be their therapist.

They're not paying you to trauma dump on them.

They're paying you to be their guide and their educator, their solution provider.

So when you can separate your personal storms from your professional purpose, you actually serve them better.

But how do you actually do this practically?

So here are three tactics that I used.

Before every work session, I gave myself 10 minutes to transition.

And a lot of my students and a lot of the, my coaching clients know I have this little routine.

I do.

I listen to worship music or sometimes I listen to Jane's addiction.

This depends.

I do some deep breathing.

I do some tapping and I remind myself of my mission to help other mamas have empowered, confident birth experiences.

And now I do the same thing for the coaching as well.

Two.

Number two, my tactic too.

I created what I call my labor Nurse Mama identity, and there's a book called Your Alter Ego Effect and Labor Nurse Mama was confident, she was knowledgeable, and she was focused on serving.

Personal.

Trish was freaking fallen apart, but labor nurse mama was rock solid and she had a mission.

She was gonna show up for these moms that didn't even know she existed.

My third tactic was I designated my book.

We had this like guest room in the house, by the way, right?

The month before I found out he was doing all the things he was doing.

We had just built our dream home.

And I was losing that too, but I didn't care.

I didn't care at all.

But I designated our guest room as my business zone.

And when I was in that space, I was Labor and nurse mama.

I was in business mode, period.

Now step number two, so those are my three tactics, but my second step was this is, and this is where most people get it wrong.

They think vulnerability means sharing every detail of their struggle and asking for sympathy.

That's not vulnerability.

That's emotional.

Dumping.

We don't wanna do that.

Real vulnerability is sharing your struggle in a way that it serves your audience and proves your credibility, and you're a real person.

So the way that I did that was instead of saying, you know, here's what I'm going through and it's horrible.

I'm going through a terrible divorce and I'm barely holding it together, I would say to them, you guys, I'm here for you, but I wanna let you know I'm having a really hard day and I'm choking up right now because I got the most insanely.

Beautiful prayers and verses and messages.

I continued to focus on the lessons I was learning about resilience, about fighting for what matters about never giving up on your dreams.

I tell my clients all the time, and most of my clients are women who are serving moms or parents, and I tell them all the time, what you're going through, how you show up matters because we're doing something that's impactful.

And what I was fighting for was.

My dream of this business and I, I also tell my clients I, my best quality is my never giver upper quality because the difference one makes people feel sorry for you.

The other makes people lean in and they wanna learn from you.

Your pain becomes proof that you understand struggle and your survival becomes proof that your strategies work.

Mine did.

Your determination becomes proof that what you're teaching actually creates results, and I started incorporating some lessons about my experience into my birth education content, not the personal details, but how to keep moving forward when you're suffering.

I mean, that's labor, right?

As strategic for them, how to stay focused when, when everything feels ca chaotic.

How to advocate for yourself when you feel powerless.

How to build your birth plan, when your foundation feels shaky.

And my audience connected with it deeply because every mama faces moments where they feel overwhelmed, where they question their strength or the ability to keep going where they need to dig deep, find courage.

That they didn't even know they had 'cause who knew I had this much courage?

When you can show your BFE, how to not just survive, but thrive during hard times, you become invaluable.

And now I'm able to use that with my clients.

This is the most important thing, the most important step, and it's what separated me from everyone else who gives up when life gets hard.

I had to get crystal clear on my why, my mission, not just what I was building, but why I was building it, and my why became bigger than my circumstances and I latched onto them.

And when it was hard when no one showed up to my Instagram lives when no one showed up to a masterclass, when I had crickets.

I remembered my mission.

My mission wasn't just to create a birth course.

My mission was also to show my kids, especially my daughters, that a woman can rebuild her life from nothing.

And all of my kids, my sons, my daughters, they all were watching me and they learned that they don't need anyone to rescue them, that they can create their own security and their own freedom and their own future.

But it was also even bigger than just my kids because I realized that every mom I helped have a more confident birth was a mom who would trust herself more in every area of her life.

Because we all know you need to learn to speak up, you need to learn to advocate while you're pregnant because you're gonna be doing it for the rest of that child's life.

And every woman I empowered in the birth room was a woman who would never doubt her strength again.

And every time I wanted to quit, every time the court battles felt overwhelming.

Every time I question whether I could really do this, I thought about my why.

I thought about the moms who needed what I had to offer, and I thought about my children who needed to see me rise up from the rubble, and that mission pulled me forward.

I'm so choked up right now when my emotions wanted to drag me backward, and now my kids can see.

What I created and what I did when I could have laid down and I could have whined and I could have fussed, I could have laid in bed crying.

They saw me rise up.

I'm hearing that song.

What is that one?

Rise up.

But here's what I want you to understand.

Your mission has to be bigger than your circumstances.

It has to be so compelling that it pulls you through the hard days because Sister, it's gonna be hard.

Building a business is hard.

It's like raising a child.

But the beautiful thing is when you're mission driven, instead of circumstances driven or even money driven, people can feel it.

They can sense that you're not just trying to make money or build a business.

You are trying to change lives, and that's irresistible.

So what happened when I continued, when I kept showing up, when I applied this framework, the results were honestly shocking even to me.

And that launch was a $24,000 launch, $24,000 in my first launch with my birth course, while working as a nurse, homeschooling three kids and fighting a freaking horrific legal battle.

Well, until the court closed down.

But here's what's even more important.

I was helping other moms showing up for them.

I was helping them prepare for one of the most important experiences, life-changing experiences of their lives.

And I was taking everything I learned as a labor and delivery nurse and packaging it in a way that empowered women to have confident, informed birth.

My pain became my purpose and my struggle, my strength, my mess, my message.

The court battles well.

They went on for years.

But I did win, not just legally, but personally.

And I proved to myself that I could handle anything, life threaten me while still building something beautiful.

And that little business, that little mission, that why ended up.

Changing my entire life.

I have traveled the world so many times.

My child has seen the world.

My children, my children have watched their mom take her lowest point and turn it into a launching pad, and they learn that setbacks or setups for comebacks.

Setbacks or setups for comebacks, they saw that a woman doesn't need anyone to save her.

She can save herself.

In my business, it became the foundation of a new life that was better than anything I had before, and this girl ain't stopping.

I've got bigger and better goals because my foundation was built on rock solid ground, my own strength, my own skills, my own determination to never again stand in Walmart, unable to provide for my children.

But here's what I want you to really understand, and this might be the most important part of this entire episode.

The hardest seasons aren't obstacles to your success.

They're the very thing.

That will make your success inevitable.

You know, there's a verse in Romans that I clung to.

There's a couple verses, but Romans five, three to four says, not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance.

Perseverance character and character hope.

I didn't want a glory in my suffering and I couldn't see how, what me and my children had gone through and, and there was more that I would find out.

I just wanted it to stop.

But as I walked through that season, I started to understand what Paul was really saying.

'cause he suffered.

The suffering I was going through wasn't meaningless.

It was producing something in me.

Something that I can now share with my coaching clients and my mamas.

It was producing perseverance I never knew I had, and that perseverance was building character, the kind of character that could handle success, because believe it or not, that's also hard.

The kind of character that could serve others from a place of genuine strength and the kind of character that could weather.

Any storm and that character, it gave me hope, not just wishful thinking, but real solid hope based on the knowledge that if I could survive this darn thing, I could survive anything.

So I want you to think about it.

When life is easy, when everything is like going smoothly, it's easy to get comfortable.

It's easy to make excuses.

It's easy to put off the hard work of building something meaningful.

His life is going perfectly, but when your back is against the wall, when you have no choice but to succeed, when failure isn't an option, because you have people depending on you, that's when you discover.

What you are really made of, and that's where character gets built.

I used to think I needed perfect circumstances to build my business.

I thought I needed, you know, more time and more energy and more support and fewer responsibilities.

But what I learned is that I needed exactly the opposite.

I needed pressure, I needed urgency.

I needed a reason, so compelling that my excuses.

They had to be pushed to the side, and I needed the character that only comes through persevering, through suffering.

That is what I needed.

Your circumstances aren't happening to you.

They're happening for you.

I want you to flip what you're telling yourself.

They're building the character you need for the level of success you're meant to achieve.

But here's the catch.

This only works if you choose to see it that way.

You have to make the conscious decision to let your suffering produce perseverance, to let that perseverance build character, and to let that character give you unshakeable hope so that you are a never quitter.

Never give her upper.

Every single successful entrepreneur I know has a story like this.

A moment when they had to choose between giving up or going in, and I. Went all in a season when they had to build something beautiful out of something broken.

And it looks different for all of us in a time when your character will be forged in the fire of your circumstances.

And the difference between those who make it and those who don't isn't talent.

It's not luck.

It's not a better landing page , or a better funnel, or a better offer, and it's definitely not perfect circumstances.

It's simple.

It's the decision to keep showing up, keep serving, keep building even when, especially when life gets hard, and it's choosing to let your suffering build the character that success requires.

So here's what I want you to do right now, whether you're in a hard season or.

Preparing for one first, write down your mission.

Put it everywhere.

Not your business goals, not your revenue targets, your mission.

Why does your business need to exist?

Who are you serving?

What change are you creating in the world?

Make it so compelling that it pulls you forward even when everything else is falling apart.

I just met with a potential client today and she's like, Trish done all these things and nothing's working, and like she started to cry and I just, I felt joy.

'cause I know she's on the brink.

Second, create your own version of sacred business Hours.

Decide when you're gonna show up for your business and your future.

Bfe your clients, regardless of what's happening in your personal life.

Protect that time like you're clocking in your future.

Depends on it because it does.

Third, start reframing your struggles as strengths.

What are you going through right now that's teaching you something your ideal client needs to learn?

How can your pain become proof of your credibility?

I mean, do you know how much this serves me now as a coach and a mentor for moms who are selling offers to other moms and other parents?

And finally, this is super crucial.

Start treating your business like a business.

It's not a hobby.

It's not your little side hustle.

Hobbies are things you do when you feel like it.

Businesses are things you do, whether you feel like it or not.

If this episode resonated with you, if you're ready to turn your hardest season into your breakthrough season, I want you to do a few things first.

Subscribe to the podcast and leave me a review.

It helps other women find these episodes when they need the most.

Second, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it.

We all know someone who's going through a hard season and needs to know that their circumstances don't disqualify them from success.

And finally, come find me on Instagram at I am Trish Ware, where I share behind the scenes content and I just.

Show up with real truth of what works when you're selling offers to women and to moms and to parents, and strategies for building a business that can weather any storm.

We also do what we call our sold out offer challenge.

We've got one coming soon.

We do 'em every eight to 10 weeks, so check the link down below.

You can always sign up if you sign up as a VIP, the first six.

That sign up for each challenge, get a one-on-one coaching call with me.

Remember, your circumstances don't determine your capacity and your pain doesn't disqualify you from success.

Your hardest season might just be the setup for your greatest wins.

I believe in you.

I believe in the dreams that are stirring in your heart.

Even if they feel impossible right now, I believe that you've been equipped with everything you need to not just survive whatever you're facing, but to use it as the foundation for something beautiful.

You are stronger than you know.

You're more capable than you realize, and you're more needed than you can imagine.

The world needs what you have to offer, especially because of what you've been through, not in spite of it.

Until next time.

Keep showing up, keep building, and keep believing that your best days are still ahead of you.

That was your cosmic slap in the booty.

I will see you again next week.

Make sure you hit subscribe, leave a review, and come listen again next week.