Keys to Entrepreneurial Success with Ryann Dowdy
Ryann Dowdy did everything RIGHT in life. She had her dream job, a 6+ figure salary, she is married, has kids, and a nice home… and still woke up one day feeling completely unfulfilled. She knew something wasn’t right.
She realized it was because she was chasing a dream that wasn’t hers. As she found more success on her journey, Ryann realized she still felt alone and misunderstood by her peers. That’s when she realized SHE herself did not have a community to come as the truest version of herself.
Today, Ryann’s mission is to create a safe space for every woman who has ever been told she’s too much, too picky, too loud, too ANYTHING to come together and be fearlessly themselves.
Because when women connect, work together, and harness our power into ONE common mission – we will be invincible.
On this episode we discuss:
- The fear of judgement and the strong urge to seek permission when starting something new.
- What separates those that make it from those that don’t in entrepreneurship.
- Why community is so crucial to success as you work to grow professionally.
Links:
Join our Facebook group to learn more about Becoming a Certified Sleep Consultant
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Transcript:
Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management. On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.
Jayne Havens: Ryann Dowdy did everything right in life. She had her dream job, a six-figure salary, she is married, has kids, and a nice home. Still, she woke up one day feeling completely unfulfilled. She knew something wasn’t right. She realized it was because she was chasing a dream that wasn’t hers.
As an expert in sales, she created a Facebook community of over 7,000 women looking to follow their dreams of starting a profitable business. Women began joining her sales training program, not only for the incredible knowledge and results Ryann brought to the table but also for the amazing community of empowered women Ryann sought to create. As she found more success on her journey, Ryann realized she still felt alone and misunderstood by her peers. That’s when she realized that she herself did not have a community to come to as the truest version of herself.
Today, Ryann’s mission is to create a safe space for every woman who has been told she’s too much, too picky, too loud, too anything to come together and be fearlessly themselves. Because when women connect, work together, and harness our power to one common mission, we will be invincible. Ryann, I couldn’t agree more. And welcome to the show!
Ryann Dowdy: Hi Jane. I’m excited to be here.
Jayne Havens: Before we get started, share your story because it’s a really good one.
Ryann Dowdy: Awesome! Let’s go all the way back. I spent 15 years in the corporate world–in sales. I started as an individual contributor, got into training and coaching. I had a really cool opportunity to travel the world or travel the country, and train sales teams. Then I was sitting as the director of sales in a digital advertising agency here in Kansas City. It was like my dream job. I was like four months in, and I was coming off of maternity leave. I just didn’t feel right. Something didn’t feel right.
Even then, Jayne, starting a business did not ring true. I was just like, maybe I’ve just been in the same industry for 15 years. Maybe I just need to go sell something else. Maybe I should hang out in a different industry. So, that’s what I did – it’s networked and talked to people and ultimately learned about entrepreneurship, online entrepreneurship, the ability to take a skill that you have or a skill that you learn and make money around. It just kind of blew my mind. Because to me, entrepreneurship meant like a brick and mortar, opening a store, like I’m an insurance agent. I didn’t want to do any of those things. That’s kind of where it started.
I started teaching sales, as you shared in my bio. Thank you for that. I started teaching sales, because this was before the Great Resignation had a name. I found these women desiring to start their own business, take control of their time, their money, their location, all of those different things. But none of them had ever sold anything before. Sales was something that came very naturally to me. I’ve been blessed to work for companies that invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales training and resources. I found it very… It came naturally. I built a business around that, and it was really incredible. I loved everything about that business and the women we supported.
I ultimately wound up opening a second business in partnership with a business partner at that time then training sales teams. Then I kind of had a little bit of a journey in the back half of 2021, where I realized that while sales is something I’m excellent at and something I’m good at, and I’ve really enjoyed talking about, but my heart, like my real passion project is really about connection and empowering women to be the best version of themselves, to find their own version of success whatever that looks like. Is it becoming a sleep consultant? Is it starting a freelancing business? Is it staying in a job or leaving that job that you hate and finding one that you love? Just really empowering women to take control of their lives. I found that the best way to do that was to create a community. Because they say the five people you spend the most time with–it’s actually wild. I’m reading a book right now–that the stats are actually staggeringly more than that. Like, it’s not just the people you spend time with. It’s the people that they spend time with, and the people that they spend time with. Our social media presences are impacting us in so many ways. I was like if I can create this safe space for women–where it’s totally okay to say ridiculous things like, “I want to be a millionaire,” or, “I want to retirement spouse,” or, “I want to work 10 hours a week and make six figures.” Nobody’s like, “You can’t do that. That’s a ridiculous idea.” So, I wanted to create that space for women to dream, and network, and connect, and collaborate. So, that’s where I’m at right now.
Jayne Havens: I love that. I really wanted to have you on this podcast for so many reasons. The main reason is that I’ve always really connected with your message, with your messaging. I love the way that you talk about things, whether it was sales back when, and now it’s more mindset stuff and where your brain is. I love all of that. You talk a lot about how you were living the life that you were supposed to live for so long. I think that that’s really relatable. I think that we all think about that stuff.
I talk every single day with women that either work full-time and hate their jobs, or they stay at home with their kids but they’re longing for some sort of like adult interaction, or to use their brain in a way that they’re not currently using their brain. Why are women so scared to follow their dreams? That sounds cheesy, but that’s what it is. Why are women so afraid to make a change? Why is everybody playing small?
Ryann Dowdy: I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. I can only really speak from experience and from what I’ve seen. First and foremost, it’s the fear of judgment. When I say that I was living a life that was so successful on paper, it wasn’t mine. I did all the things. I graduated high school. I was the salutatorian of my class, had a full ride scholarship athlete. I went to college, fell off the perfect trajectory when I quit playing ball after my freshman year. My parents were not excited about that. I finished college in three years, but then I got a job. I climbed the ladder, and I got a master’s degree. I got married. I bought a house and all the things that I said I was supposed to do. But none of those things were really anything that I had given any thought to doing. Maybe I chose my career because I really liked it. Well, that’s a lie, too. I fell into sales. It was not something I pursued. I found it, and I was like, “Cool! This is fun. I can make money doing this.”
I think that it’s just this idea that if somebody else isn’t doing it, like we look around and we look for pictures of success and so many pictures of success are that, that perfect trajectory. If we stay inside of our circle, everybody’s doing the same darn thing we are. So, it feels terrifying to be the one person in the group to be like, “Is anybody else really unhappy? Is anybody else not digging this at all?”
I think it’s the fear of judgment. It’s the fear of going to your spouse, or your partner, or your friends and say, “Hey, I’ve got this wild idea. I think I want to quit this really successful job and start a business on the internet helping moms help their babies sleep.” People are like, “What?” Even to say that out loud probably sounds wild.
I think it’s the fear of judgment first. Then we start to doubt ourselves. We’re like, “What is it that they’re going to think?” Then all of a sudden, we go internally and we’re like, “Well, you know, Jayne had sales experience so this came really naturally to her. Ryann, you came out of a sales career, so this came naturally to you. You’re an extrovert. You have more time. You have more support.” We look at all the things that other people have, and we think we don’t have those things. Therefore, we can’t have success.
I think it’s those two things. First, it’s the fear of judgment of everybody else. Then we’re like, “Of course, I don’t have all those other things that that other person has, so I won’t even find success doing that.” I think that’s where it really comes from.
Jayne Havens: I think that that’s right. I see a lot of that in my business. I see a lot of fear around making decisions that in the grand scheme of life aren’t like such huge decisions. Even taking baby steps feels like climbing a mountain for some. Sometimes when you just take that first baby step, then you realize like, “Oh, that wasn’t a big deal. I could do that.” But in the moment, I think it feels really paralyzing.
Ryann Dowdy: But that is how we climb mountains, like one step at a time. We all stand at the bottom of the mountain, and we look at the top of the mountain. That’s all that we see: it’s the top of the mountain. We were like, “Oh my God. How are we going to get there?” Then we stress out about all the things that could go wrong on our way up the mountain. But then really, you climb a mountain one step at a time. That’s it.
I was actually just in Sedona last weekend, and I did climb the mountain. It was pretty fun. If you ever want to feel like really flipping small and you want everything, the decisions that feel big, go stand next to a mountain. When you realize God created this, like this is it and then like, “I’m just this tiny little human.” Not in a powerful way. But then you realize it’s just a decision. It could or could not be the right one or the wrong one, and that’s okay. I find that anytime I’m feeling it feels really heavy, Jayne, or feels really big, or it feels beyond me, for me, it’s go outside.
I live in Missouri. There are no mountains here, so I can’t just like go play on the mountains whenever I want. It’s just going outside like standing by a lake, going somewhere where it’s quiet. Then all of a sudden it makes me realize how big and cool the world is and how like this moment, this too shall pass.
Jayne Havens: I really like that. That’s more spiritual than I tend to get on a regular basis. I really appreciate that because I think that there’s truth to that. We all feel like everything we’re doing is so big and, really, it’s all so small.
Ryann Dowdy: Right. We went to this. Again, I live in Missouri. There are no mountains here, but there are lakes. Last summer, we were on vacation. Lake of the Ozarks is the big lake here. It’s about three hours from us. I just paddle boarded out. It was like the end of the dock where everybody was. Just looking around this giant lake and all these houses and all these trees, I was like, it made me feel so tiny at that point. You’re like this thing that feels this bag of rocks that it feels like I’m carrying really isn’t that heavy, when you look at all of the stuff around us. Sometimes we need that reminder, because it can. I mean, it can feel really, really heavy some days. But I find that grounding myself in nature really helps.
Jayne Havens: I love that. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about reinvention. Because I think you’re reinventing yourself a little bit right now. I support women who are in a stage of working to reinvent themselves. I think a lot of the time–for whatever reason–reinvention feels really hard, especially for women. I think it feels easier to just stay put, and keep plugging along, and doing what you’re doing. Women are often seeking permission. We sort of touched on this. We’re looking to our partners, to our friends, to our colleagues to see if they think it’s okay that we do this thing that’s going to make us feel great. So, how do we get past this? How do you get past that feeling of worrying about what others think and seeking permission? How do you just decide to go for it?
Ryann Dowdy: Let’s talk about reinvention first, and we’ll talk about making decisions. The reason I use the word reinvention instead of pivot is because to me–I was a basketball player–pivot implies that one foot stays put. Like a pivot in basketball, one foot has to stay put and you can pivot around. Reinvention is like take both legs and move.
Going from having a career to starting a business as a sleep consultant or as anything else is a total reinvention. I think that the reason that we are so scared of that is because it’s not a pivot. We can wrap our brain around pivoting. Because I can still kind of stay in my comfort zone and pivot slightly. Reinvention is get up and move. That’s terrifying because we feel like we’re starting over. I don’t even like to say… Because people keep asking me. Obviously, my content has taken a hard shift in the past three to four months. A lot of things have changed for me. People asked me about it all the time. I’m like, “Yes, I had to. This is not a pivot. It’s a total reinvention, but I’m not starting over.” I get to take all of that experience, all of the things that I learned–from my corporate career, from getting a master’s degree, from the businesses I’ve started–I get to take it with me. We’re never really starting over.
Everything that you’ve learned, any career that you’ve had, and any experiences you have, you get to take it with you. For me, it’s just a reinvention as we get to take all of those tools that we have in our tool belt, all the things, the skills that we’ve amassed, the relationships that we’ve built, the experiences we’ve had. Now we get to rebuild something really cool, something that we actually flipping want. To me, that’s what like reinvention is.
How do you just decide? I know this is an oversimplification. It just is a decision. It’s blind trust in yourself in whatever guidance you believe in, that this is on your heart for a reason. If you feel pulled to start a business as a sleep consultant, it’s on your heart for a reason. There’s something about helping moms. It’s something about helping families that feels really, really good to you. You have to trust that it all happened for reason. The fact that you were introduced to Jayne, the fact that you are in this ecosystem doesn’t happen by accident. Maybe you even went looking for it. To me, there are no accidents. There are no coincidences. It’s deciding that this is on my heart for a reason. This is something that lights me up in some way for a reason and making a decision.
I think the reason that women agonize over decisions is we’re afraid of making the wrong decision, or we make a decision, and then we share our decision with somebody else. They don’t agree with it, and then we backtrack.
To me, one of the things that I’ve talked about a million times with my clients over the years is, successful people make decisions quickly. They don’t think twice. They just don’t. I think there’s like a really good Michael Jordan quote around that, but I can’t think of it. It’s like, “Why would I think about all those? I’ve made the decision. Period, end of. Why would I go back and agonize over it, try to rethink it? Maybe it was the wrong one. It’s just this is the decision that I made.
Jayne Havens: Because there’s always more decisions to make. That one decision is not the end. I really identify with that. I make decisions very quickly. Recently, I hired a Pinterest manager, just to give you an example. I talked to three people. One of them was awesome. The other two were mediocre. Done. Let’s go. Then if I’m wrong about her–which by the way, it wasn’t because we’ve been working together for a couple of months. She’s great. If I was wrong about her, then see you later. I’ll go find someone else. You make a decision. Then you make another one, and another one, and another one. You move on.
Ryann Dowdy: Right. 100%.
Jayne Havens: We are on the same page.
Ryann Dowdy: I think it is a matter of understanding that when you make a wrong decision–I’m using your quotes right now–that’s to be expected. I think when we do something and it doesn’t work out right, it’s like, “Oh my gosh.” Had you hired this Pinterest manager and it been not a good fit, we have this terrible habit of beating ourselves up over it and all this other garbage words. It’s just, “Okay. Cool. It didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean anything about me. Something like that happens. We internalize it, and then we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust the nudges, and our gut, and all this stuff. I mean, this started when we were adolescents. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re feeling this way.
I remember the first time I was told that the way I was was not okay was like in middle school. I’ve always been a little loud and opinionated. I was told at a very young age. Especially boys, boys are not like that. Boys are intimidated. They don’t want to be told what to do. I remember being told that in middle school. It’s like my entire life the way that I am is wrong. It’s literally, internalize that when you’re 12. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re feeling this way. It’s just a matter of realizing that you’re not feeling this way because you feel this way. It’s because somebody else told you to behave this way. I think that’s important, too. Because if it doesn’t feel in alignment with you, then it’s just not for you. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t hard. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have hard periods. Growing a business is super flipping hard. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you. Not hard for the reasons that you think that it’s hard. It’s hard because of the identity shift you have to make to do it, not because the work is hard especially the work that you all do. You help make families lives better. That doesn’t get better than that.
For me, it’s really understanding that it’s choose your heart. We’ve all seen that meme on social media. It’s choose your heart. Go to a job you hate every day, or learn how to market yourself on social media. Hate your boss and everything about the work you do and feel really crappy about it, or do work you really enjoy every day. Pick your heart.
Jayne Havens: Yes, and it is all hard. I’m successful. It’s still hard. People think it comes easy and things may come naturally to people, but it’s still hard work. Everything we do is hard work, and it never ends. Because when you’re trying to grow, taking that next step is always something else. It’s never ending. There is no finish line.
Ryann Dowdy: I love what you just said there, though. You were like, “Just because it comes naturally to me doesn’t mean it’s not hard.” I think that’s really important to point out. Because a lot of people think, “Oh, Jayne? It comes so naturally to her.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s not uncomfortable, you’re never uncomfortable. It’s just you do the things anyway.
Jayne Havens: I’m constantly uncomfortable. That’s what people, I think, fail to realize. I think that in order to grow–we’ve all seen the quotes–you have to be uncomfortable to grow. I’ve just gotten comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Ryann Dowdy: Yes. It’s super cliche, right? With success, everything you want is outside of your comfort zone. It’s so totally true. I think anybody who’s telling you otherwise is probably not giving you the whole picture.
Jayne Havens: So, let’s talk about success. Some people make it and some people don’t. That’s true in anything, in entrepreneurship. It’s true in regular old jobs. Some people make it and some people don’t. When it comes to entrepreneurship, what would you say is the major differentiator between those that figure it out and those that don’t?
Ryann Dowdy: It’s redefining failure. To me, the only way that you fail is if you quit, if you stop. To me, that is the only… Every time you reach out to a prospect or a potential client and they say no, we’re like, “We failed.” Every time we post something on social media, and we don’t get all the love and the likes and everything that we wanted, “Oh my gosh. We failed.” I see women define that as failure. We only have so much threshold for failure. For me, it’s just redefining what is failure to you.
If you were to genuinely fail on this journey that is life, what would that look like? For me, staying safe and teaching my children that we do stuff we don’t want to do because it feels safe was a way bigger failure than putting myself out there and potentially making all of our dreams come true and creating total generational change in our family. For me, failure was that. Being that example to my kids that, “We don’t really like this job, but we do it because we felt like we have to.” That is failure to me.
Sometimes we launch stuff, and it doesn’t go well. I was selling a retreat. We ultimately decided to cancel it because we didn’t get the enrollments that we needed. That is failure. I can be like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do retreats. Maybe this isn’t for me…” I’m not doing that. I’m hosting another retreat in June, which I’m really excited about. That’s just what we’re going to do. I think it’s the redefinition of failure. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing–parenting, a job, a business. It’s what you define failure to be. Because it is true that our threshold for failure is pretty low. But if you can change what failure is, then you can deal with all the crap when it doesn’t go your way.
Jayne Havens: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. You’re not the first person to have said that on this very podcast. Others say the exact same thing. Yes, I think that it’s so true, that the only way that you really fail is to quit. I hear that a lot. I think it’s really, really true. I think that there’s a lot of mindset work that goes into getting your own brain to a place where you can really, truly, accept that to be the truth. Because we hear that, easier said than done. Because it feels like crap to have a program where nobody signs up. That feels like a failure, in air quotes. But it’s not a failure. Because, how much can we learn from those experiences? What data can we collect? How can we, either, pivot or reinvent based on that information that we scooped up from that little experiment? I think willingness to try new things and to continue to put one foot in front of the other when it feels hard is what separates the good from the great.
Ryann Dowdy: 100%. Literally, in anything. You were speaking. It made me think, Jayne, of scholarship athletes. I think the data is less than 1% of high school athletes go on to play college. Less than 1% of high school athletes go on to play college ball at any level, not just the division one level. Literally, any level.
Go tell a 14-year-old that they might as well not even play baseball because they don’t have a shot of going to college to play. Would you ever do that to your kids? Would you ever be like, “You know what? Let’s just not even try out for the volleyball team, because you have less than a 1% chance of getting a scholarship to play ball.” We would never do that. We would never do that to our children. I don’t know why we do it to ourselves. That was what I was thinking of, it’s where success is such a small percentage. But that’s one of them.
There are thousands, if not millions, of kids that play sports every single day hoping that they might get an opportunity to continue their career past high school. Nobody tells them to stop trying or to not practice because your team isn’t good. There’s no way in the world. I was a full ride scholarship athlete. My team is terrible. I never went to Nationals. As an athlete, we weren’t good. Even in my freshman year that I actually did play volleyball, we were 3 and 21, Jayne. But I was still a Division 1 athlete. Nobody ever told me I was a failure because the school that I went to sucked in volleyball. That never happened. Why do we do that to ourselves when it comes to chasing our own dreams?
Jayne Havens: Obviously, sucking in volleyball is relative. You were at a D1 school, so you weren’t that bad. Right?
Ryann Dowdy: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. I could have made that mean all sorts of things: about me, about the school, about my ability. I was just like, “Yeah, cool.”
Jayne Havens: I think comparison is the thief of joy. They say that. I think that that’s really true. I think a lot of times, women especially, spend a whole lot of time comparing themselves to each other, and comparing themselves to… I see people who take my program or comparing themselves to me. That’s not fair to them or to anybody. That’s not doing them any service. Everybody has to figure out their own path up the mountain. The road is not the same for every single person. The journey does not look identical.
I think part of the key to success, I think not giving up is huge and having the right mindset is huge. Then also, being willing to pave your own path that is truly authentic, which is I think what you’re doing really right now, which is really cool. You’re paving your own path on your journey. That’s inspiring you. That’s lighting you up. That’s what I’ve done. What I started doing a handful of years ago looks very different from what I’m doing now. Maybe three or four years from now, it’s going to look really different again. That’s okay. You have to be willing to pave your own path and do business, do entrepreneurship, or whatever you’re doing in a way that lights you up and that works for you.
Ryann Dowdy: I agree to all that. I mean, it’s just life in general. It is ridiculous to look to your left and to your right. We make a lot of assumptions about people’s circumstances and their journey. Everyone looks to Jayne like, “Oh, Jayne is super successful.” But Jane is five years ahead of you in your journey. When you’re trying to compare yourself to Jayne and her journey as a sleep consultant, that’s crazy town. But that’s what we do. We never stop to ask that question of like, “How long have you been doing this?” Then figure out that that person has been doing it for exponentially longer than us. Instead, we’re just like, “Oh, well, I’m not as good as that person so I’m going to stop now.”
Jayne Havens: Let’s talk about community. Because you and I both are all about community. I place a really, really heavy emphasis on community in my program. I think that women are stronger when they collaborate than when we compete. I think that we’re all stronger together. We have really amazing brains and really great ideas. We all have varying levels of expertise in different categories. We all lift each other up when the culture allows for that. Why would you say that community is so important? Then tell us what you’re doing to foster community in your universe right now.
Ryann Dowdy: There’s a lot of data around community in general and like the likelihood of being successful when surrounded by other successful people. There’s the science behind it. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to talk about it. There’s a lot of scientific data that shows you that community… If you go back to caveman days, like way, way, way back, being ousted, being kicked out of the tribe was a death sentence. When you were in a cave, if you got left behind, you were going to get eaten by a tiger or whatever it was. That, to me, we downplay that. It’s like, “No, we were never meant to do life alone.” That was never an intention.
Again, not to give too far spiritual, you’re driving my faith path. There was there was Adam. God made Eve because he wasn’t meant to do life alone. Whether you go the science route or the religion route, either way, it is very clear that we were never designed to do life alone. I think that’s the first thing: it’s we’re not designed. Then there’s the science around the importance of our community. There are those people and their habits. The ability to connect, I think, is so, so, so important.
I think the importance of community is also around just having a safe space to go and be yourself. There are a lot of places where we can’t do that, good, bad, or otherwise. But having a place where you can take off all the armor outside of your home, having a place to do that safely, I think, is really important. It’s a big part of personal growth.
If we never take off the armor, if we’re never vulnerable, if we never have a place to go and connect, it just festers. It just festers into bad, negative, gross energy. I know that because I was there 6, 7, 8, 9 months ago at this point in the game where there was nowhere to go to like put it down. There was nowhere to go and really be seen. My nervous system was shot. I was stressed out. I was miserable. Not because I needed more information, or a coach, or anything else, I just needed a place to go where I could share what I was experiencing with people who were not going to judge me for that. I think, to me, that’s where community is so important. That is why Be in the Room became my move when I decided to step out of sales. It’s because I found that that was very common.
Once women reach a certain level of success–in career, in life, whether it’s in business, or in a job, or whatever–there’s not a lot of people who understand. There’s not a lot of people that you can go to and have those conversations. I wanted to create a space for “the me” back in June, July of last year that was miserable, and stressed out, and frustrated, and feeling just very alone, and isolated. That’s where we get lost in our head and we get lost in our drama. We start telling all these stories. Because it’s all just fueled by us.
You’ve heard the whole idea of like attracts like. The more that we stay on our heads, the more we get of that. For me, I wanted to create a space where women could come together and say, “Hey, I had a really crappy day,” or, “My launch was a complete failure,” Come to a place and say, “Hey, I just wrote a tax check for more than I made in 2016.” We celebrated for that in that same space. For me, I wanted to create that community. Because I think so often, we think it’s more information, another certification, another course, another degree. I need more information. I need to be better. I need to practice harder. Sometimes, that’s not actually what you need. Oftentimes, it is just a safe space to land and talk through things out loud.
Another reason I’m really passionate about the community we’re building, Jayne, is because marketing has told us to niche down. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need to do that. But we have niched down to a point where we have left really smart women out of conversations. Because we only put million-dollar business owners in this bucket. We put the mompreneurs in this bucket. We put people with jobs. Like, they’re not even allowed on the island. Heaven forbid. We put people who desire to build lifestyle businesses that make a couple $1,000 a month and support their family beautifully in this bucket. But by doing that, I think we’re missing the opportunity for true collaboration. To me, that is really my true mission. It’s if we collaborate at all different levels, all different skill levels, all different business levels, that’s really where change happens in a big way. Our quality of life is better. When we’re better, we can be better moms. We can be better wives. We can be better business owners. We can be better whatever it is you want to do. Be a better employee. Be a better sleep consultant. Be a better human. Whatever that is. It starts with us.
We just recently posted something on social media, that like the only place we’re told to put our oxygen mask on first is on an airplane. I think it’s totally backwards. We always have to have our oxygen mask on first. That’s what I seek to provide in the Be in the Room Community.
Jayne Havens: I love that. I’m really excited that you’re doing this. I think it’s much needed. I feel like we live parallel lives a little bit. A few years ago, we were all about the hustle and the sales. Now I am sort of also coming into my own recognizing the value of community. That is a huge emphasis of our program through Center for Pediatric Sleep Management. We’re all about bringing sleep consultants together, those that are just getting started, those that are making six figures, everything in between, those that are doing it part-time, those that are doing it full-time. Everybody looks different. We can all learn from one another. I love that you are doing something similar in Be in the Room. It’s so needed. It really is. I think the key to success is having this community. I see this with my students in the program.
This is what was lacking when I went and got trained. I didn’t feel like I have that community. That’s what I saw was missing. That’s the entire reason for why I even I created my own program. It’s because women crave collaboration and communication, all the C words. They want to get together and learn from one another, be inspired by one another, and just feel like they know other people that are on a similar journey. I think that that’s really helpful.
Ryann Dowdy: The thing is that our male counterparts do this. Men do this. If you think of golf, the golf members are a perfect example. Men do this. There are places for community. Sometimes it’s the gym. You might think of like the CrossFit environment. Yes, women go to CrossFit. But there are communities like these for… Our male counterparts are already doing this. There’s a lot of data to show it. The lack of networking community is a lot of what continues to keep the wage gap and stuff like that existent. Because our male counterparts do this and women, we do not. Oftentimes, it’s because we say we don’t have the time. Like, I don’t have the time for that. We prioritize. We’re always taught to put ourselves last. This is being done. This is not a new concept. It’s just women haven’t prioritized it because we prioritize everybody else.
Jayne Havens: Tell everyone where they can learn more about Be in the Room. Let’s do that.
Ryann Dowdy: Well, thank you for that opportunity. Our website is beintheroom.org. We have a Facebook group and a podcast by the same name. So, you’re welcome to follow along. If you would like to connect personally, I’m @ryanndowdyofficial on Instagram and on TikTok, and just Ryann Dowdy on Facebook or LinkedIn. I’m an open networker. I love people. I love serving. Wherever you choose to connect, I would love that.
Jayne Havens: Perfect. Ryann, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so grateful that you’re willing to come here and educate this audience all on the power of so many different things. We talked about a million different things today, especially sort of like mindset stuff and really the value of finding your people and following your dreams, which it sounds cheesy. But that’s it.
Ryann Dowdy: I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable some days when I talk about it. Follow your dreams and choosing joy. I felt like I’m a constant bumper sticker. I mean, it’s real. I kind of put with it for a very long time. Thank you for the opportunity to serve your audience. I’m just excited to be here.
Jayne Havens: Thank you. Bye bye.