I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with serial entrepreneur and success coach Laura Timm. In this interview, we talk about her childhood and how she overcome social and cultural boundaries to reach her potential and achieve her dreams. As always, we’ve written a summary of the video below, but it’s always worthwhile to check out the video for yourself as you may find more depth in some of the things she said than we did. Enjoy!
Laura comes from Estonia. Culturally it is considered vain or narcissistic to want personal success, and the same goes for promoting yourself. Laura still carries much of this with her today, and doesn’t talk about her success unless people ask her about them. However, this conflicts with her dream of inspiring young Estonian entrepreneurs to succeed.
Breaking through social conditioning
With these ideals built into Laura from a young age, she had to break through her social conditioning to get to where she is today. The first thing that helped her break through was her incredibly supportive mother, who would encourage Laura to try new things and come up with new ideas. The second thing that helped her was her indomitable self-belief. With her self-belief she could weather all the bullies, handle the teasing, and knew that she would, one day, prove them all wrong.
Some of Laura’s greatest challenges came from her teenage years when everybody faces pressure from society to conform and to understand exactly who they are. She had a mantra that she would repeat before bed; “tomorrow is a new day”. With that in mind, she would wake up each morning and realise that she had the strength to take on the world again, and make it her own. Her mantra gave her the strength to say “I will be different,” and reveal to herself the limit (or lack of) what she could accomplish.
Overcoming family prejudice
Whilst her mother was incredibly supportive her father was… less so. Her father’s concept of a female was classical, his expectations for Laura was to stay at home and be a wife and mother. On top of this, his worldview was that women should have their husband’s opinion or no opinion whatsoever, this flew in the face of what Laura knew she could be.
Whenever Laura would share her thoughts and opinions her father would reject them, or even listen to them. Through her affirmations and self-belief, she managed to overcome her father’s idea of what a woman, not only should be but also can be.
When you face adversity it makes you stronger and allows you to relate to more people. Laura told me that she’s grateful for all the challenges that life has sent her. Despite the pain that she felt at the time, her challenges made her grow and become a better person.
One of Laura’s greatest assets growing up was her mindset combined with her love of American cinema. As she watched these films about people overcoming impossible odds and being true to themselves she saw the possibilities of her own life. She said “many people say it’s a film, it’s not reality” and that’s what holds them back.
Huge thanks to Laura for chatting with us, you can find her website here, and her Facebook here. If you have questions or comments about the topics that Laura spoke about, head to our Financial Freedom coaching community where you can find a lot of help and support for your journey.
We’ve also got a load more interviews for you to enjoy (including more from Laura):
- Laura Timm: From corporate job to entrepreneur
- Dean Welch: Property funding when you have bad credit
- John Mark Wilderspin: Beyond Rich Dad Poor Dad
