Today’s episode is a deep dive into the topic of comparison and the struggles women face when measuring their progress against others. Crystalee Beck, of the Mama Ladder and High Five grant, shares her personal experiences and insights on how to break free from the comparison trap and embrace your own pace of progress.
We discuss practical strategies, such as evaluating your resources, setting realistic timelines, and breaking down big goals into manageable steps. Crystalee encourages focusing on the highest and best use of your time and energy, emphasizing the importance of self-compassion and grace.
Tune in for an inspiring conversation filled with actionable tips and heartfelt encouragement. If you’ve ever felt the weight of comparison, this episode will remind you that your journey is yours alone, and your progress is worth celebrating.
About a few other things…
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Welcome to about Progress, Crystalee.
Crystalee: Thank you for having me, my friend.
Monica: I. It’s good to have you back.
We’re gonna be talking a little bit about comparison, but. In a different way because it is such a big need in my community. Women struggle immensely with comparison. I think a lot of times it comes up with appearance, but today we’re talking more about.
Progress and growth, like anything that you’re trying to grow in and do better at and maybe even achieve something in it can be really debilitating when all you do is see other people going at the same thing, but at a much faster clip. And that’s what gets me the most discouraged is if I am trying just as hard I feel at something, whether it’s trying to work on some behavior things that my kids are facing or my own business, and
Other people, it feels take off like a rocket while you’re sitting back there and just pedaling on a tricycle.
So how does that come into play for you comparing your progress with someone else’s?
Crystalee: Someone that I really look up to who, I see her to be on a rocket ship and I’m on the tricycle with her is Sydney Tetro and here in Utah, I would say she’s like the number one woman in business and she’s just doing these huge things.
She raised over a hundred million dollars and just astronomical what she’s doing. I have decided very consciously, Sydney has her own experiences and skill sets and also her own hurdles and challenges that I don’t have and I don’t need, I. To be her. She doesn’t need to be me. I get to be myself and have my own path that may feel very small compared to Sydnee Tetra.
And I love her. If she ever hears this I absolutely adore her. And I’ve learned so much from her, but I never can be her. I can’t, we’re not the same people and we’re not working with the same sets of resources. I don’t think that it serves any of anyone. When we feel like we have to keep up with someone else’s pace, they don’t even know that we’re doing that, first of all.
But it, it just, it makes us feel bad about ourselves when we do that.
Monica: Yeah. It’s like a, it’s a lose. Yes. It’ll help anyone. As I’m listening to you talk, I’m like, wow, look at her. Like you’re modeling such amazing self-talk. So before we dig into a little bit more tips on this, and what you want women to learn from you today is how did you evolve to this place where you can do what you just did?
Talk it out and give yourself compassion and grace and the other person too.
Crystalee: It’s been an evolution over the years of me focusing on my own passions and interests and telling myself, There is room for me to succeed and there’s room for everyone else around me.
Everyone else can climb as high as they want. They can go far past me and that’s great for them. But I am going the pace that works for me, I.
So when you ask, how did I come to a place that I can self-coach myself, I would say that it really.
Came from a place where I was really hurting when I had been laid off from my job. My husband didn’t have a job, and we were in a rock bottom in our marriage. In our finances. And it was a time when I did compare myself to other people, like my peers own their own home or my peers. The husband has a great job.
Why can’t my husband? And I was not happy. I was miserable. He was miserable and. The way that I climbed out of that kind of self pity and an I was angry for about a year. That anger was deciding to make the choice of what do I want in my life? And. Almost blocking off mentally what anyone else does that is their business.
But what I choose to create for myself, even in between my own ears, in my own head, I just realized how much power I had. Even if we didn’t have a lot of money in the bank, even if I felt really insecure financially and even. I was like, did I choose the right person to marry? Like I, it was a very hard time, but I realized that I had the power to choose going forward what I wanted my life to feel like and to look like.
And even if it would take us more time to get to a place of financial security than our friends or. , in-laws or whatever. It didn’t, it, it didn’t matter. ’cause we were on our own path, at our own pace in our marriage and with ourselves, and it was such a lightning bolt of a realization for me that life is not a race.
It’s not a race with anyone else except for yourself. And you get to go at your own pace.
Monica: Oh, okay. That’s hitting me. That’s hitting me. Especially in the ways I already can, I can still see myself just slipping into that comparison and like we talked about earlier, that lose icky feeling.
I feel bad about. Me, I feel bad about them. I feel angry or judgmental or critical or self ping. And the biggest thing I can target from what you said is just the beauty of taking ownership of your path and your pace. So tell us what that has looked like for you, because I know that a big intersection for you is motherhood and entrepreneurship. And that’s a big part of probably how you’ve been able to practice this.
Crystalee: When I was laid off, I was pregnant, but pretty soon I had my second baby and I was home with these two little precious people, ages one and a half, and brand new baby.
They could care less about comparing to anyone else. And I had this beautiful couple of years with them where they were the people I spent most of my time my children taught me in their earliest years, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing in their lives.
It matters what I choose to do with my own time and energy. And because kids don’t care about that. They might get jealous that someone has a toy or something but really small children from the ages of zero to three, they’re pretty content. You give them a leaf or a rock or a stick and they’re pretty content with whatever is in front of them.
They’re not worrying about what other people are doing or what other people have. It doesn’t even cross their mind. And somehow over time we get programmed to try to impress other adults. And I just realized how silly that was, that we spend so much of our waking hours with these wealth artifacts or design artifacts to try to look good for other adults.
And it doesn’t really matter if it’s not what we want for ourselves.
you asked, like how did you get to that realization that you could go at your own pace? This was one of those moments and I just remembered it and it was pretty, it was, yeah, it was a big moment for me. Tell me about it. Okay, so I went to the very first conference for the Silicon Slopes Tech Conference here in Utah, and at the time, It was a sea of black suits.
I wore this bright green dress and there were hardly any women there. I’d say it was like 5% women, and at this point it’s almost 50 50, which is awesome. But I went there and I saw it to be so much of an ego, like men pounding their chest, like I’ve got a billion dollar business artist, $5 billion.
And I met one of those men, Joshua James, who founded Domo. And I remember him saying he liked my green dress. And I just had this very strong. A thought in my head, hearing some of these men talk. That I could go at my own pace, I had just barely started my business and I was there to try to find new clients and I had no idea what I was doing.
It felt very intimidating and for all of them to have their, a hundred million, billion dollar, all these huge numbers, and I was just had my little starting seed of a company and I just realized I can go at my own pace. I don’t need to keep up with those bros. I don’t need to keep up with anyone else.
I can go at my own pace. My green dress. Dang it.
Monica: How can we get better at not just owning our path, but also our own pace? Because that, I think, is even harder than taking your own path. The what can women do who are ready to do both?
Crystalee: So first of all, looking at your resources, looking at your time and your energy. This could include looking at money. It could include looking at what do you own in your home. So why don’t we, why don’t we say your own pace with. With progress on a project that you wanna do at home, we’re just gonna pick something here.
And I’m sitting here with a wall that’s not completed, that’s supposed to be this beautiful wall that’s taking me forever. It’s taken me like months to get my office set up the way that I want it to go. And some people are really good at that and they can bust it out in a weekend. I’m not one of those people.
It takes me a long time to make these kind of decisions. A few specifics, like we can decide what we want. So I decided that I want this gallery wall on my office wall, decide what we want. We can create a timeline for ourselves. Which for me, I’m okay if this isn’t done until September because I’m doing the best that I can with the resources of time and energy that I have right now.
With, yeah, we’re wrapping up summer and. With my kids outta school, and so I’m basically giving myself a pass that the time for, this doesn’t have to be today or this weekend. I’m trying to be realistic with my resources and energy, so we decide what we want. Timeline slash resource assessment. And then break it down into baby steps and you’re so good at this, Monica, of helping people with their habits and breaking it down.
But breaking it down so that we don’t have to beat ourselves up or feel bad about. Not making the progress that maybe someone else would, but just thinking through for where I’m at right now and what I can give to this specific project, this is what I can offer.
And that’s enough.
Monica: I think that first step, where you started like looking at your resources, time, energy, and money. I think all of us skip over that that’s why we compare ourselves. ’cause we think we’re on the same path. We want the same thing and yet they’re so much farther ahead of me when if you look at the resources, there’s gonna be a difference somewhere, whether it’s they have more time or they have more energy, even just naturally, sometimes that’s all you have to chalk it up to is they just have more energy than I do. Or they have more money, more resources that way. And just even starting there, I think can give you that, that room to be okay with your own pace compared to someone else.
Crystalee: Yes, and we never can fully understand what someone else’s resource allocation looks like. Ex example for myself, my husband got in an accident this summer and he broke both of his elbows. Oh. And all of a sudden, that’s for a week and a half. I was like a full-time nurse for him.
He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t touch his own face. I brushed his teeth. He couldn’t do anything. Wow. And I only, I’m not saying that for pity for me ’cause , we worked through it then there’s much more serious things in life But it was a reminder to me you’d never know what someone is going through or what their hurdles might be in their life.
And we all have different hurdles at different times. And so that week any extras? I didn’t water. Our grass went yellow. I didn’t pull any weeds in the flowers. I basically dropped everything else to go to the most important. Use of my time and we all have to do that as progressors and women we have to think through what is the highest and best use of my time today and right now, who needs me the most?
And that is perfectly acceptable.
Monica: So here’s the tricky part to that. I think as you’re honoring your resources and where you’re at in your season, how do we also not stay stuck in them? Like how do we make it so that it’s not just like a free pass to not try or to, although there’s times and seasons, I could time to say, not now, but later, but how can we not stay there in perpetuity forever and ever?
Crystalee: Ooh. So the first thing that I think of is I like to walk women through this exercise of your ideal week on repeat. Ooh. And I literally print off a blank week, that’s Sunday through Saturday. And I do this three or four times a year as the seasons change. So with my kids starting back at school, I’ll do a new one.
Where I look at in this season or this phase or semester, what is the ideal week on repeat for me? That doesn’t mean that every week will be ideal. Yeah. It basically for me means I have placeholders for my most important relationships or projects. And so like Saturday night protecting date night,
for me, it’s just having a placeholder so that I have a framework to help me maintain what I feel like is ideal for me. And it changes from season to season.
Monica: We call this the process of small wins building over time, so you’re still able to give yourself those small wins.
Like I might not be able to have, six hours a day to study towards a master’s program. I’d love to do in a couple years, but right now I can read or listen to this podcast on the same field that I would love to get into one day and I can do that on this day of the week. That kind of thing.
Crystalee: Yes.
And for me, I usually like to make sure I fit in my movement or exercise time. Because otherwise it just gets swallowed up in the day if I don’t protect time for it. I have this section in my backyard that I can see as this future like secret garden kind of thing.
I just can see it in my head, but it’s gonna be so much work to get it there. It probably two or three years, honestly. Yeah. But I just barely today realized that if I were to do 20 ish minutes a day of like my kind of. Garden time, weeded time and it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Sundays I’ll miss, but if I try to give myself that little bit of time to build towards it over the course of time, it’ll add up to a lot and I can have this beautiful kind of oasis secret garden. I. Two years from now. It’s gonna take time to get there, but,
Monica: I can relate to that in, in big ways too.
So what I’m thinking of, Christi, it’d be great to have an example of a woman in your community or maybe a few who have worked to honor their own pace and kind of the results of that both emotionally, mentally, and literally too. I think one of the things we can think of is if I honor my own pace and I won’t be making any, and I think the reverse is true, honoring your own pace and leaning into whatever that pace may be, will help you make more progress over time than you would have if you just waited.
Crystalee: First of all I’m thinking of my dear friend Lynette Evans, who I co-founded the Mama Ladder with, and she is in a nursing field and really interested in the human body, and she wanted to learn more about bodybuilding.
And I’ve been really proud of her that she’s. Been learning and making this progress day by day and how she eats and exercises. But what I was proud of is that when she got injured recently, that she allowed herself to truly step back, to take the time to heal and didn’t keep pushing to meet her goal she realized that the bigger picture here was health and not rushing for.
Checking off some goal or list it she had the bigger picture in mind, so I thought that was great.
Monica: That one really is huge. I’m just gonna give her my little silent applause over here because it is hard to rest. Yeah. When that’s the pace you need to be, because the bigger picture that’s gonna help you in the longer run is resting.
I I feel like you had another one for us.
Crystalee: And then another is My dear friend Wendy Law, who lives in England and I met her in college and she has these amazing dreams and goals for herself, and one of them was that she wanted to go to Oxford for a master’s degree, and she told me about this years ago and it was a very long process to figure out the steps of how to even be expats in England.
And she just graduated with her Oxford degree this past year. And, but it was a course of five to six years before she could pull that off with her family, and I’m just really proud of her for having a big goal and realizing that it would take time and maybe more time than she wanted it to, but to be able to build towards it little by little.
Monica: So I’m gonna peel back the curtain here and share that this podcast is part of my big picture, but still go at your own pace goal. And from day one, I’ve been wanting to really contribute to my family financially. I want this to be a full-time job at a full-time salary. I’m not there. And I’ve been doing this for seven years, which is equal parts like exciting to me and can sometimes feel a little bit depressing when you’re like, oh, I’ve been doing this for seven years and I’m still only at this point in the road. But at the same time, like, where would I have been if I had waited until I had all this time? That still hasn’t poof arrived yet, but it’s still part of that bigger picture of what I wanted in my life and my limitations I had, and the resources I had, and still, holding onto those baby steps.
The reason I’m bringing that in, to this conversation is because that’s what you do. You love motherhood and you love entrepreneurship. You have your own business that has been very successful, comma copywriters but the other thing you’ve done for so long too is mentor other moms who are similar to me.
They have a big goal and a big vision, and they also have, different resources than maybe others have and may, meaning maybe some bigger limitations. What can we say, to these women who are in that place and that relate to this bigger conversation of being able to go at your own pace?
Crystalee: The first thing that comes to mind for me, and I say this almost every day, this phrase of what is the highest and best use of, and this could be, you can fill in the blank.
It could be of your time, of your energy. Of your work time specifically and this is something I’m constantly evaluating for myself. Yeah. My own role and my business. In seven years, I’ve handed off a lot of hats and I’ve literally changed my own day-to-day role of what I do in my business several times.
So I have to evaluate for myself what is the highest and best use of my time today, and I call it the daily triage, like it can be that’s, it’s a big question to ask and it can be really hard to know. So asking yourself that question, For anything that you’re trying to progress to towards what is the highest and best use of my time for this project?
What can you get the biggest bang for your buck, basically? So if you only have an hour to give to work on a project, what would be the highest and best use of your time to get towards that? And in your case, like with. With a business in particular, any women that I’ve coached in the past, I encourage them to focus on revenue generating activities for the highest and best use of their time.
And so for me, that was doing sales for a lot of years and actually getting contracts signed because that’s when we get paid is when we have a contract signed with a client. And but that can be applied to really anything in life. What’s the highest and best use of your time or energy for this specific?
Task or project.
Monica: I love how that question can be applied both at the macro level and the micro level. Even in the moment in day to day, but also in a bigger picture of a season like you do seasonally with your ideal week on repeat. It’s the same thing. That’s fantastic. Alright, crystally, I wanna make sure that we also talk about your High Five grant, and it’s so fun to me that this is back again I know that you took a break for a little bit, but let’s talk about what it is and what you want women to know about it, who might be in the same boat as you and I, motherhood and entrepreneurs at the same time.
Crystalee: Yes, and thank you. I do wanna very briefly just say, we did take a break, and that was me needing to go at my own pace during Covid and with Yeah.
A miscarriage and in my own life like, like something has to go and this has to be it right now, which was hard for me, but sometimes we have to do that. But the High Five grant for Moms is Back, and it is a grant specifically for women who are mothers and business owners and have big goals and vision for where they’re taking their business.
And I’ve worked really hard to line up some great sponsors this year to, to have money to give away, and I’m really grateful for them. So thank you to Lowe’s and to Albian Fit and Walker Edison. Clean Simple leads, not your father’s lawyer. And Robinson Burnett. It’s a woman owned tax firm. All of them believe in mom business owners and yeah.
So we’re giving grants from $1,000 up to $10,000 this year. And applications are, yeah, it’s so exciting. And so we have eight different grants to give, where the very first time it was one $5,000 grant. Yes. And that was really hard for me to find the money for that. At that time it was really hard.
And so it’s so exciting that now this is more than four times as much grant money to give. And I have big visions. I’m gonna be brave, Monica, I’m just gonna say it. Say it. I’d love to give a million dollars a year someday in the High Five grant. And that terrifies me. ’cause I’m like, I don’t know how to do that.
But eventually I’d love to get to that point. But we have to start where we are and go at our own pace. And at this point, I’ve progressed from, in 2018 it was $5,000. This year it’s $22,500 that we’re giving to mom, business owners and all of that information is at High five. Spell out the word five. F i v e high five grant.com.
Monica: So back in 2018, the first year you did this, I applied, obviously I didn’t get it, but the reason I’m bringing it up is because it was such. A confidence boosting thing for me to even apply because you had so many great questions as part of the application that made me really think about why am I here and why does this work matter and where do I want it to go?
And it helped me clarify a lot of things that I needed. And having that clarity gave me the confidence I needed to keep going with my vision. Whether or not I got the grant, and I guess that’s carried me on now how many years since. Five. I was like, what’s the math there? But yeah I hope all women who are interested, no matter where they are in their business, they apply.
Crystalee: And I’m beaming here for you, Monica, because. That is the goal. It’s like giving a high five to women and mothers and we can’t give grant money to everyone who applies, but I am hoping that everyone walks away more confident and clear in what they’re building and their business. And I feel like that something we can give everyone who applies and I hope they have that experience.
Monica: I certainly did. So we wanna direct women there. But one thing we like to do, crystal Lee, with the episode is end with a do something challenge. So going back to our main thesis of choose your own path go at your own pace. What does, one small way women can do something to take action on that.
Crystalee: one thing to that women can do to go at their own pace, to progress towards a big goal is to literally write it down. Literally write it down, whether that’s in your journal or just a piece of blank paper. And then underneath it, Write yourself some touchpoint or milestone steps to get there.
And you could have it be at the bottom, here’s me now, and at the top, here’s me with a master’s degree or my secret garden. For me, or, yeah. Or for you, your full-time income. What are some of the touch points realistically, that you would need to have between right now to where you wanna be? What do those look like?
Just your thinking through what those are because often if we don’t write it down, we might not recognize it when it comes. Yeah. Like we might not recognize when those doors open for us, it’s been helpful for me to write down where I wanna be and what are the steps to get there. It helps me have something of a path that I can follow for myself.
Monica: Fantastic. And you know what? If they’re like me, they’re gonna resist that because it just seems that’s gonna take so much work, but here’s the little boost I wanna give them. We do a kick in the pants here too.
Just do it, but do it with an energy of excitement instead of pressure. I think it helps me, if I’m trying to really break big things down like that, to just do it with this like feeling of possibility and curiosity and excitement rather than dread and overwhelm and pressure.
Crystalee: And you can use markers or crayons so that it’s colorful. ’cause sometimes with a pen or a pencil, it feels more serious. I use markers all the time and I often will use giant post-it notes because then I feel like I can doodle and play. And it’s more fun like you said. And it doesn’t feel like drudgery.
It’s me imagining, what we imagine we can create.
Monica: Beautiful. Crystal, I’m so grateful for you. Where should people go who want to follow you?
Crystalee: We’re on Instagram at the Mama Ladder and I’m also on LinkedIn for those who are big LinkedIn people. That’s actually where I put most of my sharing energy these days is on LinkedIn, yeah. Yeah.
Monica: And are you on the mama ladder there or under
Crystalee: Crystal Lee Beck? My, my own personal name. Yeah. Crystal Lee Beck. We have company pages, but I’m really focused on my own brand there. Fantastic.
Monica: Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you and your work and your friendship.
Crystalee: Oh, back at you, Monica, you’ve taught me so much too. Thank you.
Monica: You have your own business that has been very successful, and this is where my brain is going. Crazy, comma, is it just comma?
Crystalee: Copywriters? Yeah. Comma copywriters. Yeah.
You good? Okay. So comma, we call comma too. So comma’s great. Okay. Com
Monica: comma copywriters and now good job. It’s an awful
Crystalee: thank you.
Monica: I know it’s that’s hard for me. It’s one of those things I’m not a great speaker either, like literal speaker.
