Rita Goodroe - Attorney to Dating Coach to Business Coach

Louis Goodman / Rita Goodroe - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Rita Goodroe to the podcast. Ms. Goodroe practiced law rather traditionally at first and then transitioned to business coaching. She's been featured in the Washington Post, on NBC, and CBS.

She's spoken for Fortune 500 companies and events, including Kellogg's and Volvo. She claims that she's made virtually every mistake that an entrepreneur can make. She was always on the go, but not really going anywhere. When she turned 35, she went on 35 dates in 35 days, and in doing so, met her husband.

I met and became intrigued with Rita at Pod Fest in Orlando earlier this year. Rita Goodroe, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:01:06] Rita Goodroe: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and see you again. 

[00:01:09] Louis Goodman: It is nice to see you again. You are the star of Pod Fest, always on stage, always being out there, always projecting energy, and that was just a lot of fun.

And then when the program was over, we got to. Sit down and talk informally. And that was a lot of fun for me as well. And I'm, and that's when I found out that you were a lawyer. Yes. And I thought we gotta get you on the podcast. And you agreed to do it. 

[00:01:34] Rita Goodroe: Here I am. 

[00:01:36] Louis Goodman: Can you tell us, Rita, what sort of business, what sort of practice that you have right now?

[00:01:43] Rita Goodroe: Right now I'm a professional speaker, so I do not practice the law anymore. I think of it. Fond fondly, I think of it fondly, but I, I'm a professional speaker, so I speak to groups and associations and organizations basically around the idea of connecting or leading or selling with authenticity through relationship building.

[00:02:06] Louis Goodman: How long have you been doing that type of work? 

[00:02:09] Rita Goodroe: The professional speaking has been the majority of my work now for about a year and a half. But before that for, and I'm still simultaneously doing that with business strategy and sales and marketing coaching, and I was doing, I've been doing that now for about 12 years in a row. Very important in a row. 

[00:02:26] Louis Goodman: You've been doing professional speaking for quite some time. 

[00:02:30] Rita Goodroe: I've always been speaking, right. Just not for pay. So I was speaking to get clients when I was obviously as a lawyer. I spoke a little bit, especially when I was running a solo firm as a way to show up as an expert in authority, and it was a good client building strategy.

And then whenever I went into business coaching, speaking was the number one way that I got clients. But I would be speaking to groups and associations, not for money, but for leads, for leads that could become clients. It's been about the past year and a half, two years now that I switched that model to be paid professional speaking as the majority of my revenue, and then spin off work from the paid professional speaking versus speaking for no fee in order to get leads for clients. 

[00:03:19] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally? 

[00:03:21] Rita Goodroe: Originally, I was born in Pensacola, Florida originally, but I only lived there till I was seven. So I grew up in northern Virginia in a suburb right out of outside of DC called Reston, Virginia, and I grew up there, went to college in DC, went out to law school in Chicago, and then moved back to Northern Virginia where I lived until about three years.

It's almost three years to the day when we, being my husband and I moved to Savannah, Georgia, which is where I am currently. 

[00:03:48] Louis Goodman: So where did you go to college? 

[00:03:51] Rita Goodroe: I went to George Washington University. Yeah. In DC. Put poli sci major as you do, and you're gonna become a lawyer, at least you know that. Or international affairs, something like that.

So I was a political science major at GW and then went out to college or to law school at Chicago Kent College of Law in Chicago, Illinois. 

[00:04:09] Louis Goodman: Did you go straight through from college to law school or did you take some time off? 

[00:04:14] Rita Goodroe: I did not. That would not have been allowed. My family taking time off would not be, but also it was just, I wouldn't have wanted to anyway, but I went right out of high school, right into college, did all four years back to back, graduated, and then went right out to Chicago.

I didn't know anybody in, I just knew. I wanted to, I had been to Chicago once, fell in love with the city, and I worked a lot too. I had to, so I had a couple of jobs both in college and law school to supplement my income. So when I wasn't at the school, I was either with friends or I was at a job working, and I, I loved school, but I don't remember too much about it other than I showed up, did my classes, did what I needed to do, and went out and lived my life around that.

[00:05:01] Louis Goodman: When did you first know that you wanted to be a lawyer and that you wanted to go to law school? 

[00:05:07] Rita Goodroe: Oh my gosh. I ask myself this question all the time, and I'm gonna give you the honest answer is I don't know that I ever knew, to be honest. Other people had told me my whole life that I should become a lawyer, and I just blindly followed that path and made it.

Made it. Mine said, I'm gonna be a lawyer and I can't wait to be a lawyer. But I don't ever remember a moment where I was like, that's what I want to do. I wanna be a lawyer. Like I don't remember watching a show. I don't remember seeing a lawyer. I don't remember ever going, that sounds fascinating, and that's what I want to do.

I just remember people telling me I would make a good lawyer and it sounded great, and so I just did it right. But I don't think I ever really remember saying that I just, or the moment that made me wanna be a lawyer, I just followed the path and did it. And I'm glad I did. But yeah, I don't have that moment.

That's when I knew. 

[00:06:04] Louis Goodman: But on some level, your friends and family have been telling you ever since you were a little girl? 

[00:06:10] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. 

[00:06:11] Louis Goodman: You're a lawyer. 

[00:06:12] Rita Goodroe: No, I'm a lawyer. I talk a lot. The things you're always taught, you talk a lot, you argue a lot. You should really be a lawyer. It was very, I always liked learning and researching and had that very analytical mind.

I liked writing, I liked a lot of the pieces of law school and I knew that it would be interesting. I also got into the idea of entertainment law and so I, I forget how I latched onto that, and then I just decided, okay, I'm gonna, it checks off a lot of the boxes. I'm gonna go, but you talk to some people who are like, I remember when I learned about the Constitution, I was like that, I'm gonna defend that for the rest of my life.

And I'm, I don't, I never had a moment like that at all. 

[00:06:52] Louis Goodman: I am of the belief that most lawyers are born, not made. 

[00:06:55] Rita Goodroe: Okay. Yeah.

[00:06:56] Louis Goodman: I think people are born as lawyers and then they just do what they have to do in order to actually go to law school to become a lawyer. 

[00:07:04] Rita Goodroe: To do it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my skills are such that this would be like a wonderful thing.

And I did like the idea of arguing and debating and like I said, I just checked off a lot of boxes and I thought, why not? It couldn't hurt anything to go to law school. 

[00:07:19] Louis Goodman: When you graduated from law school, you took a fairly traditional approach. You got a job working as a lawyer. Can you just tell us a little bit about your experience working as an attorney? 

[00:07:31] Rita Goodroe: I was on contract with the Department of Justice. I was working for a government contracting company. I was an employee of that government company. And then got put on assignment with the Department of Justice working in the asset forfeiture division, which was an unusual first job to be in the asset for.

I didn't even, I don't even think I knew what asset forfeiture meant when I took the job, but I learned very quickly and that was really great because I was getting a government seat without being in the government. And then I, from there, I went over to the US attorney's office, still on contract, still under the same company and in the asset forfeiture division, and really learned a lot there.

And then a firm recruited me, this firm, I was actually a legal secretary for one like period a day. It was like two hours a day in high school. I created it as a eighth period class where they gave me credit for work so that I could go and fill in these two hours a day that this law firm needed to be their legal secretary.

And so they finally convinced me to leave my contracting gig and come to their firm. And it was general practice law and I really. I generally practiced. I did a lot of, a lot. I did a little bit of a lot of a lot, and learned very quickly what I liked and what I didn't like, and fell into real estate, like residential real estate law, and became very good known as a landlord lawyer and a little bit of commercial leasing for some of the clients that we worked with.

And from there I did get recruited into a commercial real estate firm and then the recession of 2007 hit and all commercial real estate everywhere just stopped. And I had been recruited into a one man show, so it was just him and me and he was like, oh, I gotta go back to just being me. And that's when I went in-house for a government contracting company as their business real estate attorney.

And that's where I finished out my career for five or six years. I was there, so I ran the gamut, but it all centered around business and real estate law, eventually. 

[00:09:41] Louis Goodman: How long did you actually practice law as an attorney? 

[00:09:45] Rita Goodroe: 13 years. Okay. 

[00:09:47] Louis Goodman: Now, after that, 13 years, at some point you decided that you were going to take your life in a different direction?

[00:09:54] Rita Goodroe: I did. I did. 

[00:09:56] Louis Goodman: Let's talk about that a little bit. I'm really. Interested in that transition. 

[00:10:01] Rita Goodroe: Okay, well buckle up, 'cause it's not a straight line, right? It's not a straight line. I had actually been, I promise this will tie in. I had been running a singles group in the DC area called Singles in the Suburbs as a hobby through like the platform meetup.com was new back then and I was running that group and it grew to be one of the largest singles groups in the DC area. And I became an expert a little bit, according to the news on all things single. But that was funny because I was running the group with a guy I met through the group and we dated and ran that group together for five years.

And then there was a big, huge breakup and I ended up saying, I don't wanna cry my upcoming 35th birthday away. And I had this revelation that maybe I was causing myself to be in all of these bad relationships. I decided to celebrate my 35th birthday by going on 35 dates in 35 days with 35 strangers and blogging all about it.

And from that, people started saying, you should be a dating coach. And I was like, you should call my mom, right? And tell my mom I'm gonna quit the law to become a dating coach and tell me how that conversation goes. And, but things happen as they do. The universe course corrects and I walked into my job one day and they said, Hey, we are.

We're outsourcing the entire real estate division to another company. We're keeping two of you letting go of three of the lawyers. I was kept. Yay. And then they said, but because you're not really an attorney for the contractor you're gonna be sitting with, but you're not an attorney for us 'cause you're on contract.

We're gonna call you a legal compliance manager and here are your new duties and here's the new pay level for a legal compliance manager. That's just, I remember hearing myself say, no, don't transfer me to the new company or this position, like I'm gonna leave. And that's when I decided to try my hand at being a dating coach like everybody had been asking me to do.

And I came home and I had been married at that point for about three months, and my husband said, how is work? How was work today? And I said, I'm a dating coach now. And he was like, Brittany, you remarried a lawyer. He was like, I'm pretty sure. I remember walking down the aisle with a lawyer. I was like, do you?

Because I don't know, and that's not what's going on right now. And he gave me, bless his heart, he said, you have three months. To do something with this before you have to go back to the law. Now you can still do something with the date coaching thing on the side if you want, but you have to, we had not planned for this, so like you have to go back and that's when I said, no, I don't wanna go back.

I'm in this and threw myself into it, and I haven't been back to the law since. 

[00:12:44] Louis Goodman: How did the dating coach thing evolve into the business that you have now? 

[00:12:50] Rita Goodroe: So I threw myself into the date coaching and within three months I had surpassed, this always sounds so impressive. I just want everyone to know when I say I surpassed my attorney salary in the first three months of being a date coach.

Attorneys don't always make as much as you think that they do. So it was good money, but it's not like what? Like that since it was hard work. But I did surpass my attorney salary in three months, and so when I was out talking about dating. It was always a lot of entrepreneurs as well, and they would come up saying, how did you grow your business so quickly, and I started mentoring a lot of women on just sales and marketing, and within a few months of that, realized that was the sweet spot between what I had done as a business attorney and what I was doing as a dating coach and the coaching and the strategy. It was this, business coaching, sales, marketing, the coaching aspect without the lawyer aspect to it, but still in the realm of business and everything that I had loved so much when I was a business attorney helping all of my clients with everything they wanted to accomplish in their business.

And so I transitioned at the end of the first year full-time into business strategy and business coaching. 

[00:14:01] Louis Goodman: So if someone were a single lawyer and they were looking to get somebody else into their life, what sort of advice would you have for those individuals? 

[00:14:12] Rita Goodroe: You mean looking to find love? Is that it?

[00:14:15] Louis Goodman: Yes. 

[00:14:15] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. Okay. You're gonna have to drop the lawyer thinking, the lawyer way of thinking. Not everybody, this is very stereotypical, but I will say when I was coaching a few lawyers and it was, there's a blog post about myself during my 35 dates. It's like there is something about the way that our brains are trained in law school to come at conversations that is not always the most relational, and a lot of our relational conversations end up being very transactional, very type A, very about the talking, not about the listening, about fixing problems, solving problems, less about just. Empathy and just letting someone be in the problem. Lawyers don't tend to be good at letting other people be in the problem, and that doesn't really work well when somebody's just, I don't need you to fix anything.

I just need you to just listen to me. I, and then don't take that next step. So I would say a lot of it is that argumentative nature or the defensive nature, or it's, it really, I've noticed habits that get in that make us a great attorney don't always make us a great partner, and then for those solo lawyers out there, meaning solo practice lawyers that are not backed behind a big firm where you're wearing 18 million different hats in your business.

You have to, and it's true for a large law firm too. You have to make space for someone else in your life. You can't. Have your work schedules, your work life, and hope that you find someone to squeeze into the cracks. It is gonna require that you make space for another person, and that could be a trade off in what happens in your career.

It doesn't have to be a big trade off, but we do need to make decisions to prioritize love, if that's what you wanna prioritize. And it's okay if you don't, but I think the problem is when we think we can find love and we think we can work in our business 24/7 and and get all the promotions and movement and have an equal balance between the two, and that it just doesn't work like that.

[00:16:13] Louis Goodman: Now you have some very interesting ideas about running a business and building a business. Some of the things that I've heard you talk about involve working on the relationship, working on the conversation, working on getting to know people as opposed to signing up the client. 

[00:16:36] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. 

[00:16:36] Louis Goodman: And I listened to that on one of your podcasts, and I really related to it because I found that in my years of talking to potential clients, that it's very important, I think, to learn something about the client as a person and ask some of the same kinds of questions that, that you and I have been talking about. Like, where are you from? Where'd you grow up? How did you happen to get into this? And then we can start talking about your legal issues. And I ask those questions just 'cause I'm interested in people. Yeah. How did, how did they get there? And I think that, for me anyway, has been a strength in terms of my personal interview technique, and I'm not saying that works for everybody or it's the best thing for every lawyer. It's the way to do it, but I have had some success doing that. 

[00:17:30] Rita Goodroe: Yeah, no, it is, again, it's about relational and not transactional. Relational first will lead usually to the transactions that you're looking for. It can't be, it's like the byproduct of building good relationships. It can't be, the reason that you're trying to build a good relationship is to get the sale or get the client, because then you're not being authentically true about that.

But even in client cycle or customer journey cycle, people become aware that your business exists or you exist and they don't go right to the purchase stage. There is a cons, what they call consideration, and that is where somebody's saying, do I like you as a person? Do I trust you as a person? Do I trust you as a business owner?

Do I know that it'll be a good experience to work with you? Can I trust to give you money? Are you credible? Are you an expert? Are you an authority? And we have to give space for that organically to be found out before they have to check off those boxes before we then say, would you like to work with me?

Would you like to hire me as your attorney or your coach or your yoga instructor or whatever? Would you like me to be your whatever? They have to have gone through that on some level. So it's if I just sat down next to you one day and I was like, hi, my name is Rita and I'm a business coach and you have a business?

I do. Oh. How would you like to hire me as your business coach? I can know, I haven't even found out that you have a problem. I don't even know what your problem is. I haven't gotten your buy-in to have the conversation about the problem. I haven't. It just takes, and then you have to prioritize the relationship first.

It might mean that you're not gonna become a client. It maybe that I'm not the right fit for you, and maybe you just say no. Maybe. But you might refer somebody to me one day, or there might be some other information we exchange or an oper. It's no different than dating to be honest. It's like you never know where that relationship will take you.

So put the relationship first. If you do that, you'll get the outcomes. It might not be. Immediate tip for tat or like exactly an exact exchange. But overall, when you like look top down, you'll be like, oh, I got everything I wanted. And it's because I just showed up as a human and put humanity into everything that I do.

[00:19:34] Louis Goodman: Shocking. If someone were just coming out of college and interested in getting into the kind of work that you do, would you recommend going to law school? Would you recommend some other sort of educational path? A follow up question on that, which is, do you think that being an attorney gives you a certain amount of credibility in terms of talking to clients? That you're not just coming out and saying, oh, I'm a business coach, here's my card, but that also, you're an attorney, you've had training, you went to law school, you practiced law. I'm just wondering if you'd comment about those things. 

[00:20:13] Rita Goodroe: A hundred percent. I've been able to grow the businesses that I have because I have the credibility that whether it's rightly earned or wrongly earned in my case, thank goodness it's rightly earned. I'm not saying that across the board, but people do just assign a certain level of credibility from the fact that you went to law school, or you practiced as an attorney. Even if you never practiced as an attorney, there's still credibility to having the JD in your name behind your name.

So a hundred percent yes. I think it's why people trusted me as a dating. Coach to a certain extent. I was professional. I had a certain, just I can trust her kind of feeling. And for coaching, what you're really coaching people on is mindset and accountability and resilience and soft skills more than you are the hard skills.

And that means you have to have gone through it to a certain extent to be valuable and helpful to people. 

[00:21:09] Louis Goodman: You've said, as I said in the introduction, which I picked up off of some written materials that you'd provided. That you thought that you'd made virtually every mistake that an entrepreneur could make.

So what sort of mistakes do you think that entrepreneurs make and what sort of mistakes do you think that attorneys in running their law businesses make? 

[00:21:32] Rita Goodroe: Okay, so in general, the mistake most entrepreneurs make are trying to be everything to everyone and offer everything to everyone to a certain extent.

That could also be true for lawyers, depending, but I will say it is, I help people do things. Hi. Hi. My name is Rita and I help people get well. I'm sorry, what? Like I, I'm Rita and I help people build a business. What does that mean? Like it's too overly broad. It's too vague. It's not sufficient. And so when I was a dating coach, that's how I started.

I help people find love. I help people find their perfect partner. I help people find fulfilling love. And people would say, 'cause I knew that's what they wanted. I knew from all my work and that's what they wanted, fulfilling love. And yet people would say, oh, that, that's great. Then they go hire like a different dating coach.

And I would be like, what? What's going on? I'm not ready for fulfilling love yet. What I need to know is how to get a second date, or I need to know how to fill out this online dating profile, or I need to know. And then the next piece was if I was marketing so generically to try to capture everybody, I was really resonating.

With no one to resonate. I always say you have to alienate to a certain extent. So if I was trying to just say, dating is hard. You can, everybody's like, yeah, it is. But if I was really marketing to my ideal client who was a woman who had been divorced, had, was dating for her first time since her divorce, and online dating was new back then, all of, so if I said you're, you have no idea where to start with online dating, this was not, you don't wanna make the same mistake again. You wanna take your time, you wanna make sure that you're picking the right partner. All of that resonates with that client did not resonate with a 40-year-old.

Never married woman who is very much like at that moment in time, the way of thinking was why should I have to settle TikTok? TikTok like my, I, my time is running out. I need to find my partner. I need to start my life. I need to very, I, Rita, I don't need help on my, I've been to using every dating tool in the world.

I don't need help with all of that necessarily. So for them to go, oh my gosh. It's like you put a camera in my dining room and you are watching everything I say. You have to be really specific. So most entrepreneurs do not get that specific about who they help and what they help them with to get that.

Feeling 'cause they're so scared of people saying no. But they don't realize that to get the yeses to be that specialist to somebody, they're willing to pay more and hire you faster. It's easier to find you and see you. So to get those kinds of yeses, you have to get the nos from the other people. Lawyers, yes, the same, but honestly.

They don't ever look at their numbers. I don't know why I didn't go to school for math. I'm a lawyer. Right? Tell me your PL 

[00:24:12] Louis Goodman: We took Poli Sci, right? 

[00:24:13] Rita Goodroe: We took Poli Sci. Talk about your P&L. No. What You've got a I No, they, they can't step into the CEO role of their business owner, of their business. They stay very much in the service provider.

Role. And they don't hire, they don't delegate. They do, but they do it like messy, not thoughtfully, and they don't take time to really be the visionary of a business. They see themselves as the business instead of realizing the business is different from them and the business needs. In this case, affirm needs different things.

[00:24:50] Louis Goodman: Okay. I wanna focus in on that a little bit. 

[00:24:54] Rita Goodroe: Sure. 

[00:24:54] Louis Goodman: Because you have talked about how even if you're just a solopreneur, solo law practitioner, that your business is not you. Yeah. And that you have certain fiduciary responsibilities to the business. Yeah. And you also have to recognize that you have important responsibilities to yourself, to your family, and that there is this separation between yourself and your business.

The lines. Oftentimes not that clear, right? How do we look at that line, find that line, and then respect our own boundaries? 

[00:25:34] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. 

[00:25:35] Louis Goodman: Going forward on that. 

[00:25:36] Rita Goodroe: Okay, so I think first it's recognizing that it's a mental, it's a mindset work. Just to remind yourself, every day, I own a business. I am not the business.

I am a business owner. I am a person and I own a business. I am not the business. And so then the question I started asking myself was, is this in the best interest of my business, or not? Is this in the best interest of my business, or is this in the best interest of Rita? Am I making a business decision from a personal place?

And so it was those things, reminding myself, I own a business, I'm not a business. And then getting in the habit of every decision saying, am I making this from a place of what's in the best interest of my business? Or am I making this from a place of what's in the best interest for Rita? And I knew that those things sometimes aligned, most likely did not.

[00:26:21] Louis Goodman: Speaking of taking care of yourself a little bit, what sorts of things do you enjoy doing when you're trying to get your mind off of business? 

[00:26:32] Rita Goodroe: I'm a very social person. I like to be around people. I like to be in nature. I like to be near the water. I like to be, but, entrepreneur, Rita would very much just work inside all day long, like nonstop.

I wouldn't take a lunch break, I wouldn't, I fell into all of those workaholic, like, I gotta bill, bill, bill every hour and forgetting I'm not in a billable hour. Like, what am I doing? Right? But, but what I started doing was I created a statement saying that every single day it was, what is my to-do list?

And my to-do list was those things that I needed. To be the best asset for my business. So you have to build into the process what you want to be true at the end. When I'm running a successful multimillion dollar business, what do I wanna be true? What do I wanna be doing? I wanna be prioritizing my health, having fun, hanging out with friends, cultivating relationships.

So then I have to do that every day in some way. So it becomes part of the process of reaching the goal, because otherwise it won't be true once I reach the goal. 

[00:27:30] Louis Goodman: You've talked about being in love with the process. 

[00:27:34] Rita Goodroe: Yes. 

[00:27:34] Louis Goodman: And that the, let's trite to say this, it's the journey, not the destination. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. And what your experience has been and how you came to that conclusion. 

[00:27:45] Rita Goodroe: Yeah, and I will, I will tie that back into a question I did not answer earlier, which was for someone coming outta law school now, that idea of setting a destination for what they want to go into or what they wanna do, I do this talk for students and I say, look.

Think of your career, roadmap as less of a straight line to an end destination that's been carved out. You might have an idea of a destination, but now we have checkpoints along the way. It's a scenic route, so focus on what the next check next checkpoint has to be. Maybe it's finding a mentor, maybe it's go, it's learning a new skill maybe.

And then after you've checked off that checkpoint, think about what the next checkpoint is. Now what'll happen, some of those checkpoints will disappear, some of them will change. Some of them you may still end up at the same destination, you went a scenic way, or it may open up a whole new path that you decide to walk down and that's okay too.

So yes, we need to have an idea of what we love and what we want to do and lean into, but you detach from it a little bit and that's to me, what loving the process, is actually detaching from the end result so that I can actually just be present and focused on what I'm doing to be the kind of person that would get the end result.

And then when I do that, it feels a lot lighter, a lot easier, a lot more fun, which means less burnout. I'm more likely to do it. I'm more likely to be consistent in it. I'm more likely to show up for it if I hate running. I'm not going out to run. Nobody can make me run. No one, I hate it. I'm not gonna go out running.

But if I find a type of physical activity I enjoy and I like, I'm going to do it more often, I'm going to do it more consistently so I will see better results. It'll get me wherever it is that I wanna get. 

[00:29:27] Louis Goodman: Let's say you came into some real money, three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life?

[00:29:35] Rita Goodroe: First, I just pay off some debt that I have, right? That I took on as an entrepreneur and all. Yeah. I had to do it and maybe I didn't have to take on some of the debt that I took on, but I got, I've got the debt, so it's, oh, I pay that off and not do that again. I would have the buffer where I don't have to carry bad debt.

Right. I'm very fortunate. I'm very blessed to be in a place of life that I'm at, but I was raised by a single mom and what I witnessed growing up in terms of a relationship with money. That's a whole podcast for, that's another whole podcast, right? For like how that affects your relationship with money as an adult.

And I will just say that like that whole situation, I was never so intentional with money. It was very reactive to money. And I would still have to hire the best therapist to work on the reactions, but there would be some truth to not needing to be as reactional about money, and I could be way more intentional about it.

[00:30:27] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world that you could change in the legal world, the marketing world, the entrepreneurial world, or just the world in general, what's the one thing that you'd wanna wave your magic wand at and change? 

[00:30:40] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. Let's say in the entrepreneurial world, I would want access to startup money for every single entrepreneur who wants to be able to do it.

So almost like we give paid maternity leave in certain places, in certain countries. It would be wonderful if we knew someone came with a business plan and had their idea thought out and whatever, that there was some fund somewhere that said, here's three months of your expense, not like just 8,000 for your business, here's your rent for three months. Here's your rent and your groceries for three months here. Because then entrepreneurs would be able to make smart decisions for their business as opposed to the reactive kind, because they need to pay the bill. They need to, so they'll get the wrong clients. They'll discount their rates too much, and they start getting stuck in a business model they can't get out of, and I wish you would help people. We always say we want more people to start businesses and contribute to the economy, but we make it very difficult in reality for people to be able to do that. And I would start something that would allow that runway that people need to build smart businesses.

[00:31:42] Louis Goodman: Let's say someone gave you a Super Bowl ad, 60 seconds on the Super Bowl, and you had a really big platform to say whatever you wanted to a really large audience, what would you wanna say? 

[00:31:56] Rita Goodroe: I, the one thing that I always say is that idea of, of success is who you're being. When anybody says, what message do you have, it's start showing up as the person who would have everything that you wanna have? What? Do you wanna have a better marriage? Do you wanna have more money? Do you wanna have a better body? Do you wanna, whatever you wanna have, what kind of person do you have to be in order to get that thing? Just start showing up every day, say, would that person say yes to this? Would that person make this choice?

Would that person spend their time like this with that person? Just start showing up. Don't wait to be the person you wanna be. Show up as that person and you will have what you want, and I just, that's my message that I give people all the time. 

[00:32:40] Louis Goodman: If someone wants to contact you, someone wants to get in touch with Rita Goodroe in order to get that message or any other great message about being an entrepreneur, building a business, what's the best way to get in touch with you? 

[00:32:58] Rita Goodroe: Yeah, you can go to my website, which is just Rita Goodroe, so it's my name, R-I-T-A-G-O-O-D-R-O e.com. And I'm all luckily in the United States, I'm not kidding. I'm the only Rita Goodroe. So on all social media, I'm Rita Goodroe, so you can find, but LinkedIn is my preferred social media of choice.

So find me at LinkedIn, Rita Goodroe, or go to my website, pop me an email and say hi. 

[00:33:24] Louis Goodman: I suppose if we just Google Rita Goodroe. 

[00:33:27] Rita Goodroe: Yeah. I'm the one, I literally am the only one in the United States. I'm, I am not even making that up according to like public records. There is no other Rita Goodroe in the United States, so I will take it. Yep. I will be what pops up. 

[00:33:40] Louis Goodman: Rita, is there anything that you wanna talk about that we haven't discussed? Anything at all that you'd like to bring up that you'd like to mention? That you'd like to say? 

[00:33:49] Rita Goodroe: I will just say as I'm building my speaking business, which is, I will say, it's very humbling since, even though yes, I've been speaking and it is a very different business than what I was doing coaching, and it requires starting at a brand-new business, right? New relationships. And when you've reached a certain level of success in one business, it can become very difficult to feel like you're quote unquote, starting over again. But I promise you, it's something that you love. If it's something that you wanna do the right people, opportunities and things will align if you just show up and start taking the steps, right?

So what I've had to remind myself as I build this new arm in my business is stop looking for the evidence which lawyers love to do. Look, I had to stop looking for evidence that it's working because I won't see it yet. It looks like maybe it yes a little bit here and there, but overall the evidence isn't there, that this is a done deal.

Sign sealed and delivered. What I want the way I want it, every time we look for evidence that anything is working. We don't see it. We'll stop the thing, right? Or maybe you're building a new arm and it feels maybe I shouldn't be doing that 'cause this is so difficult compared to what I've built so successfully, or whatever it is.

It's just let that go. Stop looking for the evidence at the beginning that it's gonna work. Just start taking the actions and keep showing up for it and you'll be able to find where that's supposed to take you. And that's how I'm living life. Loving the process, loving the ride. I really am. 

[00:35:16] Louis Goodman: Rita Goodroe, thank you so much for joining us today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:35:22] Rita Goodroe: Thank you. I had a great time.

[00:35:24] Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:36:01] Rita Goodroe: Is that it? It and sometimes I was, and then it's, does it still work? No, usually not. Okay, great.