Iva's Blog & Free Resources

Our brains are amazing. They take in a huge amount of information about what happens around us and give us interpretations which are supposed to help us make decisions about how to act.

Of course, the way things are interpreted in our brain isn't exactly random. Our interpretation of the world around us almost always gets adjusted to align with a hypothesis that we already have about the world so the interpretation serves as proof that our hypothesis is valid. It's also called...

Feeling overwhelmed and out of control is a telltale sign that you’re not acting as a leader. And that’s where I was in that first year with Blooming Beets Kitchen.

At one point, I had tried to take a couple days off. I told myself that it was the right thing. Who knows, maybe my team will step it up. They will be okay.

And then, the same night, I checked the Yelp reviews. Two one star reviews.

“All right, that's it. They just can't do anything without me,” I thought,...

I once heard someone say in a seminar, “If you are not expanding, you are shrinking.”

I’ve written you a few times now about the struggles I experienced in getting Blooming Beets Kitchen off the ground: an embarrassing opening day, a staff which needed better leadership than I knew how to give, and eventually having my chef and sous-chef quit without notice. What followed that incident was probably the hardest year of my life, marked by me shrinking my power and expression,...

Today I wanted to talk a bit more about my growth as a leader through the story of Blooming Beets Kitchen. I previously wrote about how my leadership approach early on was to do everything and be “nice” so my staff wouldn’t be tempted to leave. It didn’t work, my leadership was ineffective at best, and the universe was about to deliver a really big kick in a butt.

It was still the summer of 2014, and we had been open for three months. Saying that things weren't exactly...

A little while ago I shared with you the story of the day I opened Blooming Beets Kitchen and how it started me on the path to becoming a truly authentic leader. Somehow, the universe conspired to send a restaurant expert to me on my very first day as a restaurateur, but at the time I wasn’t ready to welcome his input. I wanted approval. I didn’t want a judgmental jerk telling me about everything I was doing wrong.

But he wasn't the least bit interested in winning my approval or...

Before I became a restaurateur, I was an online health coach promoting healthy paleo eating. I was writing online programs, doing lots of online advertising, and things were going okay. I have put close to 3,000 people through my online-only programs.

But there was something missing. I was not interacting with humans, I was only interacting with my computer. All day long. I would wake up in the morning, write some content, do some SEO (search engine optimization), check on Facebook ads, check...

When I first opened Blooming Beets Kitchen, I didn’t know that becoming a restaurateur would lead me on a journey of self-discovery and learning what it meant to be an authentic leader. I want to share with you some of that journey and the leadership lessons I’ve learned along the way.

We all have an inner voice which offers unsolicited advice on our actions and decisions. Mine, for one, enjoys telling me that I am in over my head, like it did in the summer of 2014, when I first...

Here's part two to the video: https://youtu.be/9u1LmG98Gu4

First of all, yesterday was our first full day Create Your Life Vision Board workshop. It was absolutely phenomenal. All the women were amazing, creative, courageous, and they are set to make 2018 THEIR YEAR!! We did not just do vision boards all day, there was so much we covered to get everyone set up for success. I’m holding another one on Jan 29, you must participate. Email me to get the info sheet on this.  

As I...

I made the video above so I won’t go into a whole lot of detail on this topic. I was leading or helping with some events recently and what was always striking to me was when we asked people ‘what had you be here’, now many would answer ‘oh, my friend brought me here’, or ‘I don’t really know’, or some kind of other disempowered answer.

When you are CLEAR, you insert your intention into everything. You don’t get dragged into events by a...

I wanted to write an article on how much we crave other people’s approval. I wrote the first draft of a blog post that i was really proud of. I was honest, vulnerable, sharing just how much I need and crave other’s people acknowledgment and approval.

I sent it to Sam, to see what he thought.

His response was ‘meh’.

‘What do you mean - meh?’

‘It’s interesting but it doesn’t really resonate with me’.

(...the melodrama of rejection in...