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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and if there's one thing I know about all of you listeners around the world and all of you wantrepreneurs, and especially entrepreneurs, it's that we love growth, we love personal development, we love keeping ourselves on that journey of never-ending, hopefully positivity and optimism and belief and all those things that truly are going to be what determine whether we're successful or not with our businesses.
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And today's entrepreneur not only has such a strong message in all of those regards to share with us, but she's part of the solution.
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Her own business is really bringing all of those things to the world and to people of all walks of life so that we can forever harness those positive attributes in our growth journey.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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Her name is Keri Norton.
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Keri has spent her professional career in the software development space.
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She's worked at startups and Fortune 500 companies.
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She started as a software developer and moved up through management and leadership and eventually into product management type roles, which you'll hear.
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So much of this led to her creating a solution that is now live in the world, which I think it's so cool and important the work that she's doing.
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In her personal life.
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She's been on her own journey of self-discovery since the early 2000s, and it's those discoveries that she made that make her so excited to bring into the world the Sparkle Revolution app.
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Now we're going to hear a lot about the meaningful work that Carrie is doing, but what I love is right on her website.
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The headline is expand your mindfulness, increase gratitude, embrace positivity, improve awareness and manifest your best life All of the things that we all need to do in our own, not only business journeys, but personal journeys as well.
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So I'm excited to learn from Keri and hear her story.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Keri Norton.
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All right, keri, I'm so excited and grateful to have you here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Brian.
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I'm excited to be here us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, brian, I'm excited to be here.
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Heck, yes, I love so much about your backstory and, most of all, how it's led to.
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Your own app, your own business.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Carrie?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, so I'll maybe tell two halves of the story.
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So in my professional career, as you said, I've been in software development kind of since the beginning.
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I really have a passion for making software that solves a problem for people and really delights people, and so I kind of moved up from just writing the code to managing teams and managing, you know, bigger teams and then really setting direction for what the software was doing.
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As you mentioned, I've worked at some different startups before and then I've also worked at bigger companies, and so that was my work career.
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But in my personal life I was really kind of on this spiritual journey of discovering who I am and learning about things like the law of attraction and really trying to live a positive life, and I was very passionate about that.
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That's what I did in my free time, and so a couple of years ago, my husband and I, one of the things that we both noticed, as we were kind of on this personal journey, is when we'd go through a time where we were really practicing the things that we were learning.
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So I was taking time to, so I was, you know, taking time to meditate or I was really consciously being grateful and practicing these things, that I was learning my life would be better.
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I could.
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I could look back and see kind of the you know the evidence that these things work for me.
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But then a lot of times life would get busy and I would.
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I would stop doing these things and then I would notice, you know, sometimes life was harder.
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And so the idea for the app came from.
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That is, how can we take these reminders to be grateful and to practice mindfulness and practice gratitude regularly, and put it in an app, because everybody has their phone with them all the time, and so why not have your phone remind you to do these things and give you little activities to do these things?
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And so it kind of came out as an idea of something that we wanted for ourselves.
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And it's super exciting because that's what I did, for my career is build software, my husband's also in technology, and so we just started building this together in our spare time and we got friends and family to be beta users and give us feedback, and so it's been super fun.
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So we released the app in April of this year and now we're in the process of getting it out to people, so it's been an amazing journey.
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Yes, Carrie, I love that overview.
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It's so cool that you're taking all the skills you develop throughout your career and the fact that you and your husband get to team up in a really meaningful and important way.
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It's so cool to see how that's manifested.
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But it makes me want to ask you about that entrepreneurial bug, because I'll give you my personal backstory.
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Is you brought up the law of attraction?
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I remember when I found the Secret, that bestselling book, and read about the law of attraction, To me that was kind of a gateway drug where I was like, oh my gosh, I see possibilities that I didn't see before.
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And for me personally, of course spoiler alert it manifested into a big entrepreneurial journey for more than 16 years now, and I would argue that most of us entrepreneurs, part of that DNA is that we do see opportunities, that we do believe we can make these things happen.
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Where along the way?
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For you, was it in your career?
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Was it in the personal development journey that you were on?
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What was the moment where you said I don't just want to learn about these things and practice these things, I want to start a business and bring this thing to other, these things to other people as well.
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Yeah.
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So, like I said, I was interested in the startup space earlier on and that was just like you said said I read the secret early on as well.
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That was that was kind of my gateway as well.
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But then I got into tons of other things and so I think I realized in my personal life first you know the things that I was manifesting and I really was starting to see this evidence of you know, things that I was wanting to have, and then they would sort of magically appear.
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Usually it's like I couldn't even really plan it as well as it happened.
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And so it really came out of this desire to start helping other people see that, because once you've seen it enough times in your life, you really start to believe it and so but if people haven't seen it and maybe they're struggling, then it feels like it's harder to say to them well, actually you can create your reality, you can draw your reality to you through the law of attraction, and so it kind of came from that of how can we help other people, and we really feel like a big part of that is your overall attitude.
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Right, it's one thing to think about the things that you want and create vision boards and that kind of thing, but it's really about the positive energy that you know most of the time in your life that's going to allow those things to come to you, and so that's really was sort of the impetus for the app.
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Is, how do you remember day to day, right when you get sucked into situations that maybe aren't so happy and and you forget about your, your practices of trying to be positive, and so, um, yeah, that's really what led us to to building the app.
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And, again, we'd done startups before.
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So it was like, okay, we know how to do this.
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We've, you know, we've been in the startup space where we're building something from nothing and that's really fun for us.
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So it was just so fun to put together what we love to do and what we're doing on a free time with what we know how to do from our careers.
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Yeah, I love that, carrie.
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I'm going to hone right in on one of the most important words that you said in that answer it's actually you brought it up a few times already in our conversation today and that is practice, because we are talking about actually implementing this in your life.
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It's one thing to read a book which we've all done and we've all forgotten what we read but it's another thing to actually practice it.
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I've always been intrigued by that word practice, because we don't say, oh, I'm going to do yoga, we say I'm going to practice yoga, and it is a practice because it's part of that journey.
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Talk to me about the importance of that word and then, of course, the importance of implementing this practice in our day-to-day lives.
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Yeah, so I like what you said there, because the way that it always came into into my way of saying it is doing the work right.
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It's like, like you said, I read all the time and so I was always reading these new things and and getting new ideas for types of meditations and types of ways to practice, and then, while I was reading the book, I'd jump into it and I'd, you know, really spend the time, and then I'd forget about it right Between books.
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I'd go back to daily life and I wasn't always that good at it.
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And so the practice, I think, is just the consistency and and I like that word practice better than doing the work, because that doesn't sound very fun.
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But the thing that I've realized is the more you spend the time and it doesn't have to be a lot of time, but the more you spend a little bit of time, you know, honing your energy and thinking about the things you're grateful for, the more the rest of your life reflects it.
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And I had heard for a long time that you know if you, if you spend some time meditating, if you spend some quiet time, the rest of your day will be smoother, and so it's worth the time, even if you feel like you're super busy and you don't have the time to do that, it actually makes the rest of your day easier and so it's worth spending that time, and I've really seen the evidence of that as well.
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So again, it's just once you do it, then you see the benefits of it.
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But I think you have to kind of get in the rhythm of doing it to really see, think it's.
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You have to kind of get in the rhythm of doing it, um to to really see how it affects your life.
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Yeah, carrie, I'm going to make this conversation so much more difficult for us to navigate, because when you talk about the fact that when we start doing it, we start to see the benefits from it, I'm going to push back a little bit and use the gym analogy, because I think that's what's so hard about personal development.
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It's what's so hard about fitness is.
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You and I could go to the gym today and we could go heck.
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We could go for the next seven days straight, not miss a single day, and then we could look in the mirror.
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We'll see the exact same thing.
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And I think, looking back when I was a young entrepreneur, that was part of my frustration with things is we all want instant gratification, and younger generations are even worse than we've been in that regard.
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And so, carrie, that's what I think is so hard about that personal development journey.
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Talk to us about that hard situation to navigate, because, of course, we have to do it before we see the results.
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And when we keep doing it, then we start seeing the results.
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And I know that you and your husband have thought about that component of it, because you build in that consistency in the app.
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But talk to us about the importance of understanding the timeline and when results come, and how belief is going to carry us through those difficult parts.
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So I actually think I'll turn that question on its head, because one of the things that we've really learned and experienced is enjoy the moment that you're in.
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Right, we all have a tendency as humans to look at the thing that's out there that's going to make us happy.
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You know, once I get that great job, once we make this amount of money, once I meet that person, then I'll be happy.
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But if you really can get into this habit of finding joy in every moment that you're in, that's what's actually going to bring you those things that you want.
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So instead of saying you know how do you keep pushing through?
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I would say you know if you can.
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And again, our app this is one of the things we built it to do is kind of give you these little activities to remember to be grateful in every moment that you're in and enjoy the things that you see around you every day, that you may take for granted, but to really appreciate them, and then your, your overall life, is going to feel better and more fun.
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Anyway.
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And you know, if you've read about the law of attraction, one of the things that pushes things away from you is worrying about them, right?
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So if you're, if you're thinking you know you've heard the whole resistance, what you resist persists, right and so.
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But resistance is also about worrying about it.
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So if you're thinking about the thing you want, but you're really worried that you're not going to have it, and that's kind of where your energy is coming from, that doesn't help you get there.
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And so if you can kind of you know, put out there the thing that you want, but then focus on just living a happy life.
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That's what's actually going to bring it to you faster, and then you don't have to worry about, well, how long is it going to take, Because you're not thinking about that.
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You're not worried about that.
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You're focusing on how happy can I be right now.
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Yes, Carrie, I love the way you answered that question, Because anytime I ask about timeline in most professions there is no clear answer.
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People always ask me how long will it take me to have a successful business?
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Who knows?
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There's genuinely no way to answer that, but I think you hit a home run there, Carrie.
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I think that's the best answer to the timeline question I've ever heard Along those lines.
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You talk about resistance, and of course, resistance is natural.
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We all face it in business, we all face it in life.
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We face it in everything.
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What are some of those things that hold people back, Carrie?
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You've gone deep into this world and interacted with so many people on their own journeys.
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What are some of those reasons that you see that hold people back from a mindset perspective, from a strategy and approach perspective of how they're doing the work?
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I'd love to hear those insights.
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Yeah, I think one thing is, if you focus too much and again this is kind of, you know, part of the law of attraction but if you focus too much on the how that can create resistance.
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So if you think you know I'm going to have this business and it's going to be successful, and here's how I'm going to do it, I'm going to do x, y, z.
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They're going to look exactly like this that can, first of all, not leave you open to like miraculous things that you can't even possibly think of, but second of all, that can create the resistance because if it doesn't start happening exactly how you thought it was going to happen, you may start to worry.
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Right, I thought, well, first I was going to talk to this particular person and that's going to make all my dreams come true, and then you know you can't talk to that person, but maybe you know there's some other person that you don't even know about yet.
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That's going to be, you know, your actual key to the big success.
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And so I think that's one thing is just and it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier of just, you know, enjoying the ride.
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You know, focus on your end result, but try not to get too hung up in the details of how you're going to get there, and I think that can actually help you get there faster.
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Right?
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Because we have this tendency to think I got to do, do, do, right.
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And actually what I found is the more that you allow by being in a positive space and relaxing, then the quicker things come to you.
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It's, um, you have to kind of see it to believe it, but I've seen it.
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at this point, yeah, I love that.
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Carrie, you're also making me realize I obviously am super biased, because I live in the world of entrepreneurship.
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I love talking about this stuff but, truthfully, what we're talking about goes far beyond business.
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You and I are using business examples, but this is a life thing.
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This is a growth thing that we all aspire for far outside of our businesses, and I think what most people forget is that when we're so laser focused on business, sometimes the answer is in the personal development.
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Sometimes the answer is in achieving personal growth first and letting that be the foundation for business.
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Obviously, what you're doing with your app and Sparkle Revolution is far beyond just serving entrepreneurs, just serving people in the business space.
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Talk to us about that foundation and how I'm sure all of your users are focusing on different things besides businesses.
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How does it all play together to help all of us succeed in life?
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Yeah, I guess I would say and again at the risk of sounding a little bit woo, woo, it's all around energy, and so I feel like you know, even when I was just kind of in the corporate world, the energy that I brought to the table was always important, right.
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And so the if you can kind of tackle things with a can do attitude, if you can kind of not get tied up in you know the drama that comes up or things that seem hard, and just focus on the positive things, you know that's going to help everything.
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That's going to help your you know your personal life and your work life, because again, it goes back to the manifesting that if you're in this positive state, things will come to you more easily.
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So, yeah, I think that's what I would say.
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Yeah, I love that and it's so important because, you're right, it keeps coming back to so many of these ingredients.
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But the truth is we have to do those things, and part of what I've always been fascinated by in the personal development space, carrie, is the notion of identity, and I've had guests on before who have talked about.
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You have to become it if you actually want to achieve it.
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You have to be before you can actually do things, and I think that that's such a thing that I grappled with when I graduated from college.
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I had student loan debt and then I worked in corporate America for 10 months and I didn't feel like an entrepreneur.
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I didn't feel like when I sat down to write my book.
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I wasn't convinced that I was an author, yet I was doing the work without that identity to go along with it.
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Talk to us about how identity plays into this, because I'll add this other ingredient into the conversation, which is some people, carrie.
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They work in traditional jobs and they might think I'm not into personal development, I'm not into this woo-woo stuff that Brian and Carrie are talking about today, but the truth is so many doors are open to all of us if we choose the right identity, so I'd love to hear your perspective on that.
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Yeah, a little bit.
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What you reminded me when you just said that was the kind of fake it till you make it right.
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So it's, if you know you want to be something and you act as if you are that thing and then you kind of avoid some of the pitfalls of worrying about not being that thing and you act as if you are that thing and you kind of avoid some of the pitfalls of worrying about not being that thing, then I think that can come as far as identity.
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I know, you know again, maybe I'll put a little more of a woo-woo spin on this, but it's kind of like, you know, finding your purpose If you're in a job and you're thinking I want to do something else, but I'm not sure what I feel like it's really paying attention to your, what you're passionate about.
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You know, I feel like a lot of us start out with a lot of supposed tos and you know we get that from our parents, we get it from our teachers, we get it going through college, and so we have this idea of what it means to be successful.
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But what I have found is the more you can follow what you love to do and what you you know, even if that thing is outside of your work life, pay attention to that and see if there's something in that that can can guide you forward.
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And I think, once you can get on a path of things that you're excited about doing, you know, again things start to flow to you and I think, because you know, naturally if you're doing something you love to do, you're in a happier space and so it all, it all kind of ties together.
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But I I guess that would be my advice if you're short, looking for your identity is really noticing the things that that you love, that kind of you know.
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Pull you out of yourself because you're enjoying them so much when you do them, and then explore that right, see if there's something around that that can kind of lead you forward.
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Yeah, carrie, I'll tell you what.
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Hearing you talk about these things it's making me so excited to talk not only to Carrie, the subject matter expert, but also Carrie, the product development expert, because it's so cool that we're talking about big concepts.
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Some of them are intangible and it's hard to really describe it until we start doing the work and experiencing it.
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As a product developer, you have put together an app that takes on a lot of this work and guides people through this journey.
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Talk to me about the way that you've laid that journey out within the app.
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Sure, yeah, so that that was fun.
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So what we ended up doing and we went through I'll say another thing that we did here is we went through a lot of iterations of what this could be.
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So what the app is today is not exactly where we started when we had the idea, and I think that's something you know, that I would maybe say to your listeners too, is be flexible and kind of see where things take you.
00:19:27.934 --> 00:19:49.865
But what we ended up doing is we have daily activities, so three activities a day that you know you can set notification times on your phone to get reminded to do them, and then the the activities themselves focus on gratitude, awareness, positivity and manifesting, and you can pick your manifestation goal that you want to kind of focus on, and so these are kind of quick activities.
00:19:49.865 --> 00:20:30.127
They're meant to be, you know, three minutes or less, and so in some cases you're writing something in your phone, in some cases you're starting a timer and you're, you know, thinking about something, you're focusing about something, and so there's, you know, like many, I would say many journaling types of things, affirmations, and so the idea is to keep you interested, and these activities themselves came from, like I said, the years and years and years and hundreds of books that I've read and the experiences that I've been on, and also my husband and the others in the company of putting together these different types of activities, and we really focused on never having anything in the app come across as guilting you, right?
00:20:30.275 --> 00:20:35.207
So like, if somebody doesn't use it for a while and they come back, we have a message that welcomes them back in.
00:20:35.275 --> 00:20:36.884
It's okay if you weren't here for a while, it for a while and they come back.
00:20:36.884 --> 00:20:37.948
We have a message that welcomes them back in.
00:20:37.948 --> 00:20:38.809
It's okay if you weren't here for a while.
00:20:38.809 --> 00:21:00.720
Um, but that's really what it's trying to do is get you to think about different ways of approaching you know, gratitude and awareness and, um, positivity, uh, and remind you just over and over to do it, because the hope is, the more you're doing it, because the app is reminding you, the more it's gonna pop into your head and you're, you know, maybe thinking about these things throughout your day that you spent three minutes on, but hopefully it pops up again.
00:21:00.720 --> 00:21:09.717
So that's that's kind of the idea, is it's it's we think of it as a place on a journey, right, there may be a point where somebody's done this enough.
00:21:09.717 --> 00:21:13.781
And then they're like well, now I want to, you know, meditate for half an hour.
00:21:13.781 --> 00:21:16.284
This is not enough for me, and that's okay, right.
00:21:16.284 --> 00:21:20.249
We're just trying to kind of give people a path that meets them where they're at.
00:21:21.029 --> 00:21:37.936
Yeah, I really appreciate that perspective because, also just from a business perspective, it's a deep understanding of the people that you're serving and so I guess, staying along those lines I always remind listeners that you are one of us, you are a fellow entrepreneur, so it's fun to tap into that side of the way that you think as well.
00:21:37.936 --> 00:21:41.967
Along those lines, let's talk about where you fit into that journey.
00:21:41.967 --> 00:21:47.376
Is this something that when you plot it out, hey, let's launch this app into the world and now you've got real life users?
00:21:47.376 --> 00:21:54.299
I love seeing the testimonials that are on your website because it's such a simple solution to something that we all embark on in our lives.
00:21:54.299 --> 00:21:55.722
Where do you picture that?
00:21:55.722 --> 00:21:58.207
Is this for people who are already into personal development?
00:21:58.207 --> 00:22:04.006
Is it for the total noob who's saying I want to start increasing gratitude and embracing positivity more?
00:22:04.006 --> 00:22:06.604
How do you strategically think about your placement there?
00:22:07.615 --> 00:22:13.318
Yeah, so I mean that's one of the things that we've done you know that we do in the software space is you talk about your persona.
00:22:13.318 --> 00:22:14.381
Who are we targeting?
00:22:14.381 --> 00:22:20.865
And we decided that for right now the idea is somebody who is familiar with the space.
00:22:20.865 --> 00:22:31.713
So we're not trying to target somebody that's never heard of doing mindfulness or maybe never heard of the law of attraction, but maybe somebody that's read the secret and they're kind of interested, but they're really not sure where to start.
00:22:31.713 --> 00:22:33.477
Maybe they think you know meditation.
00:22:33.477 --> 00:22:34.597
That sounds like way too much.
00:22:34.778 --> 00:22:38.863
I don't want to do that, but I'm interested in practicing a little more mindfulness in my life.
00:22:38.903 --> 00:22:44.849
I'm interested in learning a little bit more about manifestation, and so that's kind of our sweet spot right now.
00:22:51.396 --> 00:23:06.299
Going forward, we have ideas of building more and more flexibility into the app so that if you come into the app and you're wanting you know I'm ready to do 30 minutes, five, you know, three minutes is not enough for me then you could set that as a setting or you could pick, you know, if you're a little bit more, tell you know, go ahead and give me woo activities, because I want to hear that, because we don't have a lot of that in there right now.
00:23:06.299 --> 00:23:10.782
Right, because we're trying to keep it, you know, open to people that are maybe not that far down that path yet.
00:23:10.782 --> 00:23:20.731
But we also want to want to at some point be accessible to people that are further down the path, and so that's been our thinking all along is that it meets you where you're at eventually.
00:23:20.731 --> 00:23:31.076
But right now, you know, to get us started, it's a little more focused on people that know about it, have the awareness of it, but maybe are just, you know, trying to figure out a good way to fit it into their lives.
00:23:31.718 --> 00:23:47.026
Yeah, carrie, it's cool to hear the way that you think about these things, because what I'm seeing as you're talking is a roadmap, and we, as consumers, we benefit from having a roadmap for the cool tools that we all use, that people like you are brilliant and you can actually build it and launch it into the world.
00:23:47.026 --> 00:23:49.303
How do you pick that roadmap?
00:23:49.303 --> 00:23:53.285
Is it something that you just have a million ideas and you flesh out?
00:23:53.285 --> 00:23:58.720
Okay, here's the value add for our consumers, here's what's easy to actually develop and deploy.
00:23:58.720 --> 00:24:01.326
Talk to me about it, cause I'm certainly not technical in this component.
00:24:01.375 --> 00:24:02.859
I'd love to hear the way you navigate it.
00:24:04.546 --> 00:24:05.890
Yeah, it's super fun.
00:24:05.890 --> 00:24:09.441
So, I mean, there's definitely an element of just kind of brainstorming and it's.
00:24:09.441 --> 00:24:14.623
You know, sometimes it's with friends and family and people who know we're on this journey and they have ideas and they throw them out there.
00:24:14.623 --> 00:24:24.923
But then what it comes down to, so you have the big pool of ideas, but then we're figuring out, well, what's reasonable, right?
00:24:24.923 --> 00:24:27.075
So, like you said, some things take a lot longer than other things, and so where can we start?
00:24:28.415 --> 00:24:35.038
And then, ideally, you want feedback from your users, and so, you know, we did do a lot of talking with our beta users.
00:24:35.038 --> 00:24:37.423
That's why we had beta users early on, is, you know?
00:24:37.423 --> 00:24:41.201
We did little bits of it and we let them use it, and then we asked them, you know, what else would they like?
00:24:41.201 --> 00:24:45.521
And we put out surveys of things, ideas that we already had, and we also asked them for new ideas.
00:24:45.521 --> 00:24:56.684
And so I think that's an important element, as well as hearing your users, and it's always helpful once they talk to somebody if they haven't seen anything and just ask them to dream something up.
00:24:56.684 --> 00:25:08.671
But once you have something out there and they're using it, they may be thinking, well, gosh, if only it had this feature, I would, then I would use it more, right, I would, I would love it more, and so it's kind of that constant feedback loop as you go.
00:25:08.671 --> 00:25:10.336
So all of these those things feed in.
00:25:11.176 --> 00:25:13.160
But one of my favorite things is really figuring out.
00:25:13.160 --> 00:25:15.423
Then we have all these ideas.
00:25:15.423 --> 00:25:18.428
We have all you know, ideas that we came up with, ideas our users came up with.
00:25:18.428 --> 00:25:21.132
Now what can we actually do?
00:25:21.132 --> 00:25:34.679
And you know, there's this concept in the software world of minimum viable product or some some say, minimum lovable product, and so the idea is you come up with what's the you know quickest way we can get this done, that it's still something users will love.
00:25:34.679 --> 00:25:41.858
And then, when you get it out, there again you hear the hear the feedback and you may you know you may have thought of 20 other things that you wanted to do on that feature.
00:25:41.858 --> 00:25:46.480
But as your users use it, they may have other ideas, and so you can learn from that and move forward.
00:25:47.162 --> 00:25:48.203
Yeah, it's so cool.
00:25:48.203 --> 00:25:55.005
Carrie, I'm going to ask you a personal question here on the air because I think I still I'm intrigued by the fact that you and your husband get to do this together.
00:25:55.005 --> 00:25:55.925
That's so cool.
00:25:55.925 --> 00:25:58.210
What do your internal meetings look like?
00:25:58.210 --> 00:26:00.884
What are the separation of duties, if you will?
00:26:00.884 --> 00:26:03.564
What's the strategic vision and how do you merge those?
00:26:03.564 --> 00:26:05.142
I'd love some of those real life insights.
00:26:07.055 --> 00:26:14.363
Yeah, you know I mentioned that I had done startups in the past and actually my husband has done them with me, so we've had some experience doing startups together.
00:26:14.363 --> 00:26:23.544
We both have a technical background and so a lot of times when we're designing features, like we just talked about, we're brainstorming those things together.
00:26:23.544 --> 00:26:28.683
Like I said, we brainstorm with the other people on our team and even friends and family to get ideas for that.
