The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Kim Sorrelle

Welcome to episode #128 of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. In this week’s episode I spoke with Kim Sorrelle, owner of several businesses and an author.

Top Talking Points

• How to continue your work when going through personal challenges.
• Understanding a truer definition of what love is.
• How love is fundamental to the meaning of your life.

Resources & Links

Connect With Kim at KimSorrelle.com.

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Thank you for listening to this episode of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. If you enjoyed my conversation with Kim, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and please leave a review.

Episode Transcript

Announcer

Hey, welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan

Hey, Kim, welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast. How are you?

Kim

I’m doing great. Ryan, how are you today?

Ryan

I’m doing great as well. Thanks for asking. I’m excited to talk to you. As we always do, let’s start off by telling my audience of morning upgraders who you are, what you do for a living, and then something you are grateful for right now. Okay, well,

Kim

I am a lot of things. I am an entrepreneur, I run a nonprofit organization, I started my first business when I was 18 years old. So I’ve been in the business world forever. I’m not going to tell you my age, but it’s been a long, a lot of years. And I am a mother or grandmother. I am an author. I’ve got a best selling book out. And I’m a speaker, and I am a lover of all people and black licorice.

Ryan

Black licorice. That’s and that’s the first.

Kim

Yeah, I do like my Do you like it?

Ryan

I can’t say I really do like it. Honestly,

Kim

I don’t run into many people that do and it’s so good. But, yeah.

Ryan

Sounds like a new business, you need to start, you know, some form of black licorice. Right? What about what are you grateful for?

Kim

I am grateful for my family. I’m grateful that my kids are all gainfully employed tax paying citizens and none of them on my payroll, and that they live independently and work independently. And I find that to be a victory.

Ryan

I think it is a victory. My kids are still young, but I can see that they’re starting to accomplish things in their lives and early 12, 10 and eight as we record this, but they’re starting to grow up until like polite people that are, I can tell they’re starting to find their way a little bit. And I’m like, Ah, look at that. Because sometimes you feel like, you know, even as an adult, you’re still trying to figure things out. And you gotta raise these little human beings. And so if you’re someone who’s not know if things are going well, and it’s kind of neat to see their progress, you know, not that things are perfect, but progress is nice to see.

Kim

So it’s first, sure and it’s fun. Like every age is fun, every stage is fun. But it is so fun to see who they become, you know who they are at eight compared to who they were at three and how they’re the same, but yet they’re evolving, just like we are hopefully still evolving, right?

Ryan

Yeah. Did you like with your kids, like personal growth was that a part of, of their upbringing at all, or not really,

Kim

They were surrounded by crazy people in a way. I mean, I always had my own businesses. And so they came to work a lot. And they learned to work hard, they learned what it was like to be self employed, and decide if that’s something that they wanted for themselves. But to be disciplined, you have to be pretty disciplined. If you’re going to run your own business, and you want it to be very successful, and employ a lot of people and do a lot of good in the world. So they were surrounded by that, even though there wasn’t necessarily a written structure to it. It’s when I look back and think of what they were exposed to. That certainly helped create who they are today.

Ryan

Are any of them going into entrepreneurship? Are they working for someone right now?

Kim

I have five and three of them are self employed. One of them is an engineer for NASA, and the other one is a cancer researcher, PhD MD PhD.

Ryan

Base. Okay. Do it. Okay. Do it all right. No, no, no. That’s great. So let’s talk about your mornings. Kim. How do you start your day?

Kim

Well, I set my alarm, I tell Alexa what time to wake me up and I jump out of bed quickly, throw on clothes, and I go for a 45 minute walk outside. And I do it with a friend who lives about an hour away from me, we call and talk on the phone and talk about our days. And so being outside in the fresh air is great. And then I make a cup of decaffeinated coffee after a quick shower. And listening to Darren Hardy were big Darren Hardy fans. So I love the Darren dailies. They’re they’re really good. And then I prayed to the Lord to help me with my day. I look at my list from yesterday. That is always longer than what I can complete in a day, carry over whatever I didn’t get done and make a new list for the day and go at it.

Ryan

You’re Michigan Correct?

Kim

 I am. 

Ryan

What do you do in the winter? Do you still do the walk?

Kim

Yes. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. I would like to do the walk in Hawaii. There’s a lot of places I’d rather do the walk. It takes some discipline. I think to get up on a snowy or rainy day we walk rain shine snow doesn’t matter the weather we walk and I know that my friend is going to be there. She’s been my best friend since high school and I know she’s going to be there so I can’t let her down. So having that accountability keeps us both going and making it happen.

Ryan

Oh, you work together. I thought you said phone. Okay. It’s like well, we

Kim

do on the phone but together on the phone, so yeah, we’re talking. We’re walking.

Ryan

Okay, got it. That’s cool. Yeah, I have a daily habit of walking as well. It checks off a lot of boxes for me. So I am in New Jersey. And so yes, cold winters as well. I found that I like to save the duck Jack and the brand save the duck. And nothing is warm as can be. So you put the hood up with the liner inside, and it can be 10 degrees out and it doesn’t feel like it. I mean, your legs aren’t great, but your upper body is toasty.

Kim

Yeah, that’s nice. I actually earlier this year, just a couple months ago, I bought these wind pants and a Wind Jacket from Costco. And it is so warm. And I’ve been out I mean, it’s been 20 degrees already. And I’ve been out in it and I’m sweating when I get back. It’s amazing. I spent, you know, $20 or something and got the greatest wind pants and I could I could die I guess.

Ryan

So for those listening in the cold states that want to walk in the winter, you’ve just gotten some clothing tips from us. You know, that’s really true. So obviously walking with your friend brings you happiness and fulfillment, what else brings you happiness and fulfillment?

Kim

What I get to do every day, I lost my husband a few years ago and it made me question love the reality of love the truth about love and, and so I took a year I dedicated a year to figuring out what love really is and discovered that a lot of what we’re talking about love, a lot of what we think we know about love isn’t really love. And if we know what love really is, it’s life changing. It’s transformational. And it has changed my life a lot. And now I’m very passionate about sharing what I know about love because it’s changing other people’s lives as well and could change the world. And so most of my day focuses on that. Whether it’s talking to people like you, or setting up speaking engagements or writing articles or working on my next book. I love life. I love what I get to do every day.

Ryan

Can I ask you a question about that? About your husband? Your two questions, actually, the first year that you lost him that first year? How did you get through your responsibilities that you work and kids and all that stuff? Well, kids are you, they’re grown, but I guess mainly work like how did you get through those core responsibilities? Having suffered that loss?

Kim

Yeah, well, that’s a great question. I was 47. When I lost my husband, and he, we worked together, he works in the businesses as well. And I was diagnosed with cancer. And then four months later, he was diagnosed with cancer. And he died six weeks later. And so there was a bit of a process and it all. Fortunately, our businesses were all large enough that we had people working in them, we had great staff. And so we add people to take over the day to day to do the things that we would be doing. And priorities change. You know, when you’re hit with something like that, priorities kind of change. And you realize the almighty dollar isn’t the only thing that’s important in life. And so it’s okay to take a step back and breathe for a minute. And then when I was ready to physically ready to go back to work, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. If I was going to go back into my businesses. I was also running a nonprofit, I run a nonprofit still today, but I had stepped down from that position when I was diagnosed with cancer. And so when I went back, I went back to work as a part time bookkeeper of an organization that my father and I had started just kind of taking life slow as I was going to figure out my new life alone. 10 days after I took that position, there was an earthquake in Haiti that killed 200,000 people. So within two weeks, I was in Haiti, and then for the next several years, I spent at least part of every month in Haiti. And I learned quickly that service is healing service. The best thing I could have done for my grief is to go and get outside myself and serve others.

Ryan

I think you’re kind of answering the question that I was going to ask you but I’m gonna ask anyway, cuz you want to add something to it. I was going to ask you. If I was speaking to the 45 year old Kim that hadn’t yet suffered the loss of her husband and had to battle cancer. How do you live differently now versus then? Daily, moment by moment?

Kim

I think it’s so easy when you’re so busy. When my world, I had five kids, my oldest biological child was four and a half when my fourth biological child was born. It was insane. My life was insane. And on top of it, I coached basketball. I coached volleyball. I was ahead of the girls ministry at church and it was a crazy life and It’s okay to breathe. It’s okay to not be the superachiever. It’s okay to breathe. You know, when you’re so busy, it’s like there are things that can happen in a day that can make a day go by so slow, you know, and when you’re putting out fires, when you’re whatever, it can seem so slow, but then the years can go by way too fast. And to slow down and realize that the most important thing in life are people. And to make sure that you’re not not neglecting people. I mean, that’s one of the first things I learned about love is that, that love I use this old poem Love is patient love is kind of worked on one word a month, when I did this year long thing and love this patient would say, this is the most important moment of your life, this moment right here, right now it’s in the past is in the past, what’s in the future is yet to come. This is the moment. So to leave every distraction out of your head. And that being thinking about the meeting, you have later who you have to get to soccer practice what you get to stop and get at the grocery store on the way home. But to be fully focused on the person that you’re with, whoever that is a co worker, child, a neighbor, or somebody at the grocery store or whoever, but to give your undivided 100% focus that’s love. That’s, that’s respect and love to be completely in that moment. And when you live that way, when you live in the moment, moments take on a whole new meaning. And you listen, you hear things that you’ve never would have heard and you see life in a completely different way.

Ryan

Yeah, I think this is such an important message because I’m living it right now between a couple of businesses and the pressure that comes from that, and the three kids and all their activities. And some of these activities like my one daughter are dancing very competitively now, and things are coming her way that it’s just getting very complicated and exciting at the same time, but just very chaotic. I’m just trying to remind myself to be present. You know, that’s where meditation comes in. For me, I’m just answering, from my perspective, the meditation comes in the certain books I’m reading like, Man, I’m gonna butcher his name, he’s a monk, he’s not alive anymore. But stick that down. I mean, so glad I was there wasn’t embarrassing, but he’s, he’s got he’s got books about like, enjoying the, the simple things like washing dishes, just just sit there and wash the dish and just enjoy it. And I’ve taken a lot away from that. And so it’s really just training yourself to slow down and just be present in the moment and stop thinking, all the busy thoughts and your to-do list and all that, you know, so I think it’s a really important message that you’re spreading right now.

Kim

Part of it that goes along with that too, is to think you know, I get to do these things. I get to my husband’s gone I get to do these things, I get to see my grandbabies I get to experience what I’m experiencing in life, I get to wash the dishes, instead of I got to and you know, when you make that mind shift as well and realize, again, that it’s people that are important, then life, life takes on a whole new meaning.

Ryan

What is the meaning of life in your personal opinion? I use mentioned relationships, being in the moment is there anything else that from your, through your lens? That’s really important in terms of the meaning of life?

Kim

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think one of the things that about love that I that I learned about love is that we have some myths about love like we’re taught that love is a two way street you know that you give love and you better get it back and But love is not a transaction you know, if I give you money you give me a pair of jeans that’s a transaction if I give you love to get love, that’s a transaction that’s not love love is 100% up to 100% You don’t control anybody. And if you love to get love then then you’re gonna be disappointed you’re gonna have a heart ache because you don’t control that love coming back you just control the love giving and love has a special way of coming back to you but that’s not why you give it and when you live that way when you realize that all you have to do is love that’s all answered is love people that’s that’s really your number one job that’s really all you have to do. And when you live that way you give yourself freedom to be exactly who you believe you’re created to be and at the same time you give everybody else freedom to be exactly who they are created to be. So it’s okay to have a different opinion, it’s okay to have a different nationality label go away. Life is not about labels, life is about people, about individuals. It’s not about I love everybody but those darn Democrats are Ah shoot those Republicans right then you don’t love everybody you know love everybody for who they are recognize the beauty in the individual and the uniqueness and that we’re all different. Yet so much the same.

Ryan

I really like it. I really like the message you’re spreading here and the vibe. I really think it’s really important. I don’t talk about love much on this podcast that I can recall at least. And I think it is a really important topic. So I’m glad we’re going. Glad we’re going in this direction. And I’m also shocked how fast this conversation is going because we’re almost at the time I’ve got one last question for you. I want to go to business it feels very abrupt to go from what we’re talking about the business but being that you are successful business owner, and I do have entrepreneurs listening, I would like to kind of pick your brain in terms of how you’ve had success and in growing your business, what comes to mind like, what has worked for you and growing your businesses.

Kim

Be authentic, be who you really are when you try to be somebody else, or you try to fit a role or try to mold yourself into looking like somebody else. People sense that people know that and people want to do business with people that they trust, and they’re not going to trust you if they don’t think you’re being authentic. Just be who you are. Be who you are. There’s gonna be nose along the way, plenty of nose but every note was one step closer to a yes, take the nose, learn from the nose and rejoice in the yeses. But all the while be who you are. Be the real you.

Ryan

You bring love into your workplace. Absolutely.

Kim

You know, it’s not something you can hang up in the closet when you get to the office. Right?

Ryan

That’s true. Well, this was great, Kim, thanks for everything you shared. If someone wants to reach out to you, where should we send them?

Kim

Kimsearle.com is my website but my last name is ridiculous. I’m literally the only Rossbach my way in the world because they asked way too many letters to our students who else so are our E LL. E. But love is the name of my book. Love is and love is that info you can get to my website. But if you Google love, chances are I’m going to pop up.

Ryan

Perfect. All right. Well, that’s all up in the show notes page. Thanks, Kim. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Announcer

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