That’s Rebecca (with the good hair) in the center with her Kickass Mastermind group and me – leaning on us littler people.

Sara: Hey everybody, I’m so happy that you are here back at The Mastermind Podcast and this is Sara Christensen your host. Well, we do have a special guest today and I don’t think I have done a case study on the Podcast, and I don’t think I’ve ever even just had a conversation with two people.

Usually we do our format of Hot Seats, but this is going to be fun because Rebecca and I are friends and she is one of our Kickass Members and we’re going to talk about what it’s really like to be in a Kickass Mastermind because right now we are accepting applications at JoinKickass.com so I wanted to share from Rebecca’s perspective what it’s like to be in a Kickass Mastermind. 

I haven’t told her to say anything specific, this is going to be an honest off the cuff conversation and I probably will ask her the good the bad the ugly the awesome about Kickass so you guys will have that insight into it.

So without further ado, welcome Rebecca. And for those of you that don’t know Rebecca, yet she is at RebeccaUndem.com and Rebecca is a champion for ambitious women who live in small towns. She lives in a small town in North Dakota called Oaks, North Dakota population of 1,800. Which, I can relate to because I grew up in a town of 2,400.

Rebecca is a speaker and author, and she is also the executive director of a new nonprofit called Growing Small Towns.

So tell us a little more about that, Rebecca. I’ve had a front-row seat to seeing Growing Small Towns get birthed because it has been part of your what you’ve been working on and getting support from inside Kickass. So tell us a little more about that, and how that developed and how that how your Mastermind supported you through that.

Rebecca: It all started for me with a desire to own this main street building on Main Street in my small town. And I wanted to renovate this space to be, as crazy as it sounds: co-working. And I think there’s a cool opportunity to feature people that are makers of things and do short term, like pop up shops, but have a physical set location right on Main Street, that we would help market those people. So I started to have this whole plan for what I would put in this building, which happened to be a building that my grandparents ran a Ben Franklin craft store from when I was a little girl. 

It’s all this connection and love for the building. So I started thinking about that and then started thinking about all I’m trying to accomplish. What am I trying to do with this? I want to help small towns grow. So you know, I think sometimes ideas come to us, and we aren’t ready for them. When this first came to me, I wasn’t ready for it, and some of it has evolved. 

For me, it was a bit on our chamber presidents of our local Chamber of Commerce. They sat on our economic development board, and I sit on our foundation board. So I was in discussions with these people where I was starting to see, you know, the challenges of kind of our traditional approaches to how we grow. 

How do we grow our small town? Well, we’re not going to like recruit thousands of people to move here, that’s just not going to happen. So what does sustainability for my community look like? Given my entire professional background, how am I positioned to solve that? That’s where growing small towns as a nonprofit came forward because I think it opens up a beautiful opportunity for partnerships of other people, and organizations and companies that care about the sustainability of small towns. 

Sara: It’s really exciting. You mentioned this idea that didn’t go away, right? It came to you, you couldn’t sleep, and there’s all this stuff happening in your life that was saying “pay attention to this, pay attention to this!” because I think we all get those signs and signals. What do you do with that? Do you wrestle with it yourself? Do you bury it?  

Rebecca: It’s funny, Sara, I wouldn’t say that I’ve been impacted the most out of anybody that’s a member in Kickass Masterminds. But I will say, I was sitting with our accountant laying out the vision for growing small towns in the building, and she said, “Where do these ideas come from?” Without even hesitating, I’m like, “Well, I’m surrounded by a group of people that constantly challenge the way that I think about things.”

I couldn’t get that kind of support locally. The people here are, they’re beautiful, and they’re amazing. But I think this is for any of us.  It’s like an echo chamber and happens in big cities, too. Because you kind of hunker down with your people, and you don’t ever get challenged, you know, against the prevailing thoughts of your crew, whoever those people are. So that has been the biggest thing.

And I knew that I could that you would hold that for me, like my group, I knew that all of you would, you would challenge me to what I was missing, and you’re still doing that, as this whole thing has evolved. But you also believe in me in a way that you’re you’re not holding all the fears that my family holds? You know, my family, my mom, my dad, they’re like: what? What the hell? Why do you want to do it? 

I could probably go without another business. Sure. But, again, that doesn’t suit that feeling when I’m lying in bed at night thinking about it, and feeling like I’ve somehow been entrusted with this. If I bring the fears up, you honor them, and you let me sit there with them. But you also help me move through them. And you would never let me make all my decisions based on them. You guys just allow me to be expansive in a way that locally, I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. 

And that’s so important being an entrepreneur, right? Because we’re innovators were people who have big thoughts, and want to change the world want to create financial stability. It is difficult to always be in an environment wher