Ep586: Marylen Ramos-Velasco – Strike a Balance Between Taking Care of Yourself and Others

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello, fellow risk takers and welcome to My Worst Investment Ever, stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that when investing, you must take risks but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives and that mission has led me to create the Become a Better Investor Community. In the community, you get access to our global asset allocation strategies and stock portfolios, our investment research weekly live sessions and the risk reduction lessons I've learned from more than 500 guests go to my worst investment ever.com right now to claim your exclusive podcast listener. Lifetime discount. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Mary Lynn Ramos, the Lascaux Marilyn, are you ready to join the mission?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 00:58
Yes, I am.

Andrew Stotz 01:01
I'm excited to have you on and I'm going to introduce you to the audience. You know, here in Thailand where I am. We are taught when we first learned how to study Thai to roll our ours, so I was just playing around there. So Mary, Mary Lynn is the founder and CEO of customized training solutions Asia's most trusted, customized solution provider. She has 15 years of experience in sales and marketing, customer service, event management and operations in the hospitality industry. She worked in Event Services focusing on specialized training and summit since she moved to Singapore, with her gift of leadership and strengthen partnerships to drive clarity and training, she is living her purpose to make life easier for others. Her solutions include, but are not limited to training, coaching and consulting for leaders and organizations while she helps trainers, coaches, speakers and consultants with personal branding, sales and marketing services, my goodness, Mary, then take a minute and tell us about the unique value you bring to this wonderful world.

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 02:07
Well, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Andrew. And what I believe I'm bringing value in this world is really making it a better place to live in by making things easier for most people, right, whether they're leaders, organizations, or even the partners that they work with, which you mentioned earlier. So it's, and what I've heard from some of the clients that I bring in, on the table whenever I work with them is that not only that I make life easier for them. But the insights that I filter from being able to actually like hear the insights of several global leaders, as well as thought leaders, and filtering it into a conclusion, on my own perspective, is the value that I bring in on the table.

Andrew Stotz 03:00
Interesting. Why, you know, I'm wondering, everybody wants things to be easier. But why are things complicated? Think about your clients that come to you. Why is it so damn complicated? You know? And how do you make it easy?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 03:16
I believe from my experience working for the last seven years, at least in my business, it's really more of like a lot of people, leaders and organizations, I would say they make things complicated, like, so what I do is like, I do my best to simplify, simplify all those things for them, because the way I work is very practical and common sense. And so that's the reason why it's always like, Okay, I think you're making it complicated. It's just about this, focus on this, balance this, do this, or like, you know, there's a holistic way of doing so.

Andrew Stotz 03:57
Right. And maybe you could give an example of a client of yours that was trying to achieve an objective and it just was hard and difficult. They came to you and then you were able to deliver tell us a little bit about that, just so we understand what you're doing.

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 04:12
Okay, one of my favorite clients that they have worked with in the past, because they are also in the hospitality industry. So I can relate a lot to them. And their challenge is really like how can we increase our sales and also decrease the customer negative feedbacks in, in, in the restaurant and food and beverage area. And so like, I actually hear them out. They shared with me what are the challenges that they're facing and what their goal is. And so we came up with this program with the help of my partner, Helene during that time, and we actually started with a mindset and from there We've actually seen the shift. So after like, like, several months, they actually contacted us again, like they wanted the Level Up program. So it's basically like, reminding them of how mindset is important in doing the business, right. And if the people are on the right mindset, they have the tendency to like, okay, my purpose is to serve the clients and leverage with the theme, to be able to help each other to, to serve the customers in such a way that they would be delighted. Right? And, and I think that's what they missed out for a while. And so they get like, a lot of complaints, and they even don't know how to upsell, these are simple things, you know, everyone who have an opportunity, or a touch point when we're the customers to be mindful. All right. So what we did is we started with a mindset Team building for them. And then we reminded them of what are the standards, you have to like to know, in the FMB industry, to make it as international best experience for your customers? And from then they've been receiving, like, a lot of positive comments. They are improving, they have increased their sales as well.

Andrew Stotz 06:25
Yeah, I'm just thinking about that person in the company going, I've given them that KPIs. I've told them what they got to do that, you know, they need to get it right. You know, we keep getting these complaints. What are you guys, and they're missing this, the simple thing is, people need direction, they need to understand what value are they bringing, and then they need to be trained. And you know, there's just all of that. So it's not as easy as just sitting behind a desk watching KPIs and telling people they're underperforming. So that's interesting. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 07:06
For me, it's not really so much of the worst investments I have made, because I made quite a lot. Unfortunately, I invested a lot with the wrong people. I've also lost some money into an investment I made, which is apparently a scam. But I think it's really more about the balancing act of my investments. And I'm to share with you my story, this is kinda like quite personal. Because I'm always coming from an energy of love and compassion. And so sometimes, I did too much to other people who don't necessarily my time and effort, right. And also, I had the tendency to forget about myself, as well as the setback boundaries, which actually caused a lot of burnout, stress and even depression. So in fact, last year, I had several gastritis attacks. And as we know, like, this type is really a cause of stress, right. And I had to go for some hospital procedure, which actually made me realize that I actually forgot about self-love and self-care. Yeah. And that's where I'm coming from when it comes to balance, right? I, if I have to take care of so many people around me, I also have to take care of myself. And despite that, you know, I am investing a lot of my time, or I'm working on my knowledge and my skills. But sometimes I also forget, or I forget to invest on my body. And so, as well. And that's very interesting, because every one of us, we need balance, we are very, very interconnected. We're human. Yeah. And so like, I would like to share this quote from Eleanor Brown, that she said that rest and self-care are so important, it's not being selfish when you when you care of yourself, right. And when you take time to replenish your spirit, it allows you to serve others from the overall flow, and you cannot serve from an empty vessel. Right? So and since my energy is really so much around service or serving others, so it's important for me to have that balance between taking care of myself and others as well. And that's quite similar to the professional work that I do. I tend to give too much to like a lot of people and, you know, they get to, they somehow expect to get our services or solutions for free. In fact, during the last few years as well during the COVID, right. I have transitions from face-to-face to virtual programs and I run about four to six programs, monkey. And when I invite a guest to join for four sessions, not many would be willing to invest in themselves. So that's like, oh, very interesting.

Andrew Stotz 10:14
Yeah. So how would you summarize what you've learned from this experience?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 10:20
I, I would summarize what I have shared is, from from the experience I had in the last two and a half years that it's very important to have that balance of investment on myself, first of all, to ensure that I satisfy the aspects, different aspects of my life, as well. And it's important to have that self-love and self-care. And also, when you invest with the right people, be sure to set that boundaries as well. And, like, and because one of my strengths is also like my intuition, so I have to listen to my intuition to be able to like, really assess is this the right investment, whether it's money, or people or like, whatever time I was, in, whatever things that I will invest my time with, right. And also be able to do as well to take

Andrew Stotz 11:26
maybe I'll share a couple of things that you made me think about too, is, first thing is in self-care, you know, you got to take care of yourself first. And so when I, most days, when I get up in the morning, I just get out of the house and walk to the park and I go for a little run, then I go to the gym and stretch a little bit. And then I come home and get ready for the day. I also try to get good sleep. And I can see that sleep is the number one issue for myself and many other people that were trying to get enough sleep. And for me, I don't have a problem falling asleep at night. But I tend to wake up pretty early. And I would be better served probably by staying in bed, but I got so much going on in my head. So and then of course there's nutrition, there's hydration, and all that stuff. And I think about you know those things, if you don't get those things, right, you're never going to be able to run it's like buying a Ferrari and running it on cooking oil. It can run, but you're never going to get peak performance. And peak performance allows us to actually work less because we can contribute more at the time that we're you know, engaged. That's a big one. I think the the other thing is just the idea of our time, and the way we look at our time. We're in this age where people feel like you gotta give away and you know, people want things for free. I remember when the internet first started, it's like, everything's for free. And then you start realizing on the internet, actually people will pay to stop the flow of information. So some newsletters will curate news, and someone may pay 10 bucks a month for that, you know, and basically, you've got to think about your value. The other thing that I see is that there's nothing more powerful as an accountability partner, than putting money down. I don't want to work with someone that's not putting money down on what we're doing. Otherwise, their attention can shift away pretty quickly. And even if I would say in my evaluation masterclass boot camp, we have about 30% of students, even though they paid and it's not money back at that point 30% of them will drop out, even though they pay. And so what you notice is that money is a powerful motivator, but even for some people, it's not, but I love the accountability of money. Anything you would add to that?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 13:50
Yeah, very true. I mean, that's also from my experience, because I invest a lot on myself. As I mentioned earlier, like I pay 10s and 1000s of dollars, just to have like the right business mentors and coaches in my life. So it's normally when we actually do that, we tend to again, like what you shared as well, right? Like within, oh, I have a stake in this. I have to like make sure I maximize the investment they have made for myself so and normally like people would think like, okay, when I pay, I would normally like, get something out of it. But always remember that knowledge is power, but it's only powerful when you take action. When you know something about it, right?

Andrew Stotz 14:41
You just reminded me of the first expert I ever hired. I was 2120 Maybe 22. Her name was Wong Way. She was in Los Angeles. She was a top tier tennis table tennis player. And I really want to do of my game. And so I went to work with her and I worked with her for like half an hour. And I would go see her regularly and train. And after the learning, I would just take all these notes. I was paying, you know, I wanted to get what I was getting from her. And I kept those notes for many years, and it definitely helped me. So it's a good reminder also to find the experts out there, find the good people and get involved with them. So based on what you've learned from this story, and what you continue to learn, what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering, the same fate,

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 15:35
it's more of the balancing act. So when you invest in yourself, it has to be the mind, body and soul. And that same from this freedom business, right? You have to take care of the mindset cuz I started doing my business with a lot of technical niche programs. And I am not satisfied despite that I get like positive feedback out of the session. So that we are on, I felt that, you know, it has to be a balance of that mindset, heart set. And well being together with that technical capabilities. We're interconnected, we have to be happy and to be happy and satisfied or fulfilled with the things that we do, we have to be able to balance all this. So we need to have that essential skills or whatever they call it Life skills, soft skills, whatever it is, they have to balance that way the technical capabilities as well. Because the more they get to integrate into balance both the more they succeed, the more sustainable their successes,

Andrew Stotz 16:43
balance. So what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners,

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 16:47
we have several resources, and we have like upcoming programs. So if they would like to visit our website, that's triple w at City solutions, global.com. They will find like several resources, they can find helpful. We have our blogs, we have our online resources, and we have upcoming programs to help them handle or have that balance in their life or in their professional life.

Andrew Stotz 17:19
Right. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Next question. And last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 17:31
My number one goal for the next 12 months is to create more Win Win Win outcomes for myself, my clients and my partners through the work that I do, which is basically around education, empowerment and inspiration.

Andrew Stotz 17:47
Well, we need more win win wins. So I like that. All right, listeners. There you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet joined the become a veteran investor community. Just go to MyWorstInvestmentEver.com right now to claim your lifetime discount exclusive for podcast listeners only. As we conclude, Marilyn, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of A. Stotz Academy I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Marylen Ramos-Velasco 18:21
My parting word would be to invest in yourself. Because that will be the very best investment you can ever make in your life. And do continue to lead with passion and purpose. Thank you.

Andrew Stotz 18:36
Fantastic. That's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person Mary Lynn to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your Worst podcast host Andrew Stotz and I'll see you on the upside.