How To Follow A Vegan Diet Without Feeling Deprived With Ariel Zachow

04:03Jimmy Clare: So do you want to tell me a little bit about yourself?

04:07Ariel Zachow: Sure. My name is Ariel. I am currently based in New York, but I'm sort of working my way to Greece. I'm a certified personal trainer. I'm a group fitness instructor and a 500-hour registered yoga teacher. I have a small sort of online fitness business and I'm mostly part yoga, part travel. That's kind of my whole deal.

04:33Jimmy Clare: Yeah, well I've seen a lot of your pictures on Instagram and you make me want to go travel.

04:38Ariel Zachow: Oh good, I'm actually really happy to hear that. That's kind of the goal.

04:41Jimmy Clare: Unfortunately, there's no way to travel to.

04:45Ariel Zachow: Oh, I am going stir crazy like I'm sure you can imagine.

04:50Jimmy Clare: Yeah.

04:55Jimmy Clare: So what made you want to get into health and wellness?

04:59Ariel Zachow: so when I was younger, I did theater growing up. Um, and I, I loved everything about it and I loved the feeling of inspiration that you got when you went to see a show. And I knew that, that I loved having that feeling of being inspired by seeing someone perform and I wanted to be able to give that back to other people. So I moved from California where I grew up to New York to pursue musical theater. one thing kind of led to another, I didn't love the industry. I decided that it wasn't for me, but I wanted this. I still had this desire to be able to, to sort of forward that feeling of inspiration. And, and somehow, I ended up in, in health and wellness and fitness. And, it's a similar sort of a thing, weirdly, when I teach my classes, it's almost like performing, but it's still giving back this sort of positive energy and helping people to feel good about themselves and to, to live a nice healthful life. so it kind of checks all of the boxes minus the, you know, the theater part.

06:10Ariel Zachow:

06:10Jimmy Clare: Well, I used to be in health and wellness as well. And then I got stuck in on a very, very, very hard science course in my major. And.

06:23Jimmy Clare: I wouldn't say I gave up.

06:26Jimmy Clare: I learned, here's what I literally did. I went to class, I got home, I studied and I still failed. And I withdrew from the class.

06:35Ariel Zachow: Hmm. Yeah, sometimes it only takes one, one sort of moment to be like, all right, let's, uh, let's shift. Let's go a different direction from here.

06:44Jimmy Clare: Well, it was like.

06:46Jimmy Clare: I enjoyed all the other classes, like my weightlifting class, my nutrition class.

06:54Jimmy Clare: My yoga class was okay until it got really weird. I had to write a four page paper in my yoga class, which I thought yoga was supposed to be relaxing, but.

07:07Ariel Zachow: Four page paper about what?

07:10Jimmy Clare: I don't honestly remember. I didn't even know how to say it.

07:13Ariel Zachow: Huh. That's weird. I've never asked any of my students to write a paper.

07:19Jimmy Clare: Oh, that's good.

07:34Jimmy Clare: It started at like 24 people, then dropped down to 12. Four other people were failing along with me.

07:37Ariel Zachow: Oh wow.

07:43Jimmy Clare: Yeah, let's just say that teacher didn't have a good reputation.

08:34Ariel Zachow: I'm yes, that's a pretty safe assumption to make, I think. I'm not naming any names.

08:41Ariel Zachow: They know who they are.

08:44Jimmy Clare: So what places have you traveled around the world?

08:49Ariel Zachow: I believe I'm at 18 countries right now. I've done North America, a bunch of Europe, and I did a little time in the Middle East. I went to Oman and Dubai. There wasn't a place that I went that I didn't love. I particularly loved Greece, but it was close. It's awesome to see cultures and things that you don't even really know exist until you go and see them. It's been funny to be back now because I think I was gone for about five months and I did 15 countries in that time. To be back now in the US is interesting because it is really different. Things are more stressful here, I guess, than traveling around. I'm so glad. The whole world is a little rough right now.

09:46Jimmy Clare: Yeah, you could say that again.

09:49Ariel Zachow: Exactly.

09:49Jimmy Clare: Exactly.

09:53Jimmy Clare: Do you, did you run into any like kind of bad places around the world?

09:59Ariel Zachow: You know, the one place that I will not go back to, and I'm so sad to say this, is Italy. When I was in Rome, I felt very unsafe. I know that traveling alone as a female does pose some safety risks in general. Just traveling, even in a group, you have to be mindful of where you are. But I spent a lot of time living alone in New York and I didn't live in the best neighborhoods. I, at that point, had traveled relatively extensively and I know how to hold myself when I'm out traveling and when I'm by myself in a major city. But Rome, I felt super, super unsafe. And there were a couple of times I was approached and I knew that I don't know what the intentions were, but they weren't great. And I tried to walk away from someone at one point and they grabbed onto my arm and wouldn't let me leave. And then I've since talked to a lot of females who've traveled there by themselves and they have a similar story where it's just not super safe to travel alone to Rome, which is really sad because it was so beautiful and the history is incredible. But Italy is on my no-go list for future travels. Don't put it at the top of your list. Don't not go, but go with caution. Go with friends, for sure.

11:22Jimmy Clare: That sounds like the movie Taken It All Over Again.

11:25Ariel Zachow: Oh, you can't even tell you how many times my dad was like, I keep watching Taken and Locked Up Abroad. And I'm like, Dad, please. I'm going to be fine.

11:34Jimmy Clare: I only watched that movie maybe 20 times and probably quoted that same line over and over and over again. Yep, yep. Unfortunately I can't repeat it because it's probably copyrighted. Oh, definitely.

11:41Jimmy Clare: Yeah, yeah.

11:45Ariel Zachow: For sure.

11:48Ariel Zachow: Oh, definitely. They'll come for you.

11:51Jimmy Clare: And then they probably make another Taken movie.

11:55Jimmy Clare: Taken four. We don't need any more Takens. No, no, no.

12:01Ariel Zachow: No, no, no. No, there's enough stress in the world right now. We don't need to add to it.

12:10Jimmy Clare: Out of all the places you've been to, where is your probably most favorite place?

12:15Ariel Zachow: It's a tight tie between Athens, Greece, and Muscat, Oman. They're just both so beautiful and the people are so kind and so warm. I grew up in California. California is always home for me. They both felt a bit like California and that's something that I really liked. But with Greece, I'm a vegan as well. That's part of my whole thing. Greece I found to be very vegan friendly, which is sort of surprising based on the culture there, but I felt just so at home. When I traveled, I spent a couple of weeks in Greece. I left my things there to do two weeks around Europe to hit other countries and then I came back to Greece. After I had done that two weeks of traveling around and I flew back to Athens when the plane landed, I had this feeling of, oh, I'm home. I've landed home. That feeling is just so nice and I was like, all right, well, I'm going to move to Greece. Now I'm moving to Greece.

13:24Jimmy Clare: Was it hard for you to come back to the US?

13:29Ariel Zachow: It was really weird because I came back right as the coronavirus started to get very widespread. So I traveled through Manila in the Philippines. I was one of like three people not in a mask and this was before it really had even hit the US. So it was bizarre to do that. I was a little bit in limbo when I came back.

16:18Ariel Zachow: And then I came back to live with my dad, which is a little step back as an adult. It's definitely an adjustment. There are major comforts and major benefits to living in the US and I do love the comforts that I get here, but it is different. They're completely different worlds. So happy to be back, but also ready to leave.

16:46Jimmy Clare: Uh, I wish I could leave.

16:48Ariel Zachow: I'm very lucky. I take time to be grateful every day that I, that I am able to just leave, just find a new country.

17:00Jimmy Clare: Yeah.

17:01Jimmy Clare: It would be nice to go to a new country right now. I'm tired of sitting in New Jersey. Yeah. That's absolutely right. Yeah.

17:08Ariel Zachow: Yeah.

17:11Jimmy Clare: only 50% of the boardwalk is open and where the rides are.

17:17Jimmy Clare: The owner of the whole boardwalk is, he's charging for people to get, not even get onto the rides yet. He's charging people to get onto the pier with the rides. And so I'm not paying just to browse the rides.

17:28Jimmy Clare: I know.

17:32Ariel Zachow: Just to walk and see them with my eyes, yeah.

17:35Jimmy Clare: Yeah, I'll look at the distance from afar.

17:39Ariel Zachow: Right. For free.

17:41Jimmy Clare: I've been here since I was a baby, so I pretty much know my whole way around anyway.

17:53Ariel Zachow: Right, right.

17:55Jimmy Clare: You know what, maybe I'll get one of those flying drones.

17:58Ariel Zachow: Oh, I want one of those so bad. That would be so cool!

18:02Jimmy Clare: Yeah, yeah.

18:05Jimmy Clare: I'll give everybody a digital tour.

18:08Ariel Zachow: So get out those little screens, and little headphones.

18:12Jimmy Clare: And while you were over here, you said, oh, wait, it just shut down.

18:15Ariel Zachow: Here you see another side are empty rides.

18:19Jimmy Clare: Yeah, it's not doing anything. He's charging for empty rides now.

18:25Ariel Zachow: That's so bizarre. And I was reading today, they've shut down a lot of the part of California that I'm from. They started to open back up and the governor just said, nope, close it back down. So it's weird.

18:51Ariel Zachow: bizarre time and it's impossible for anybody to plan anything because nobody knows where we're going to go from here or what's going to happen. I know myself included, a lot of people who teach any form of fitness can't teach right now in person. I think I read that gyms and yoga studios and dance studios and things like that are on the very top of the list for highest rate of transmission, which makes sense if you're breathing heavily and sweating. It's hard. Teaching online is great, but there's a difference to teaching online than there is in person. What do you tell your clients? I want you to leave, so please don't come over.

19:38Jimmy Clare: Exactly. My sensei had to, when he reopened his dojo, he had to, he basically put in all the like new vents and everything like kitchen grade, bacterial suction vents. And he installed something else. And he's like, yeah, now everything it's clean air and clean everything. And, and, and like, I know he's doing his best, but right now I'm staying on all the zoom classes because I'm down at the shore for the summer because my parents are trying to sell the other house just to downsize. And yeah, I'm just like, no, thanks. I don't want to go back yet.

20:29Ariel Zachow: Yeah. I think for a lot of us teachers and even students, you want to stay healthy by continuing to work out, but you potentially are doing the exact opposite of that by going to a class. But it's hard. You miss the friendships and the camaraderie that comes with that. It's weird. People have had to shift in ways that I don't think anybody was ever anticipating was even a possibility for this world.

21:04Jimmy Clare: Yeah, I haven't said...

21:08Jimmy Clare: I know from my karate class on Zoom, it's really different because they shut off the microphones on our end, so no one hears any background noise. But...

21:23Jimmy Clare: And like you said, you don't get the camaraderie, but you can still hear everything on the other side.

21:28Jimmy Clare: But.

21:32Jimmy Clare: And so I kind of still feel like I'm there.

21:37Jimmy Clare: I feel better that I can still.

21:42Jimmy Clare: do it as long as I'm in my house and you know, he's open up again. There's only so many spots per class so I can just drop in and show up like I used to.

21:54Ariel Zachow: Yeah, that's another thing that I've found. And I've been teaching online for several years, so I have a relatively extensive background in it. But it's weird because I'm shifting now my personal training clients online and

22:09Ariel Zachow: There's like this, you lose a lot between, you know, when you put a screen essentially in between you two and to say, okay, well now turn to the side, now turn to the back and let me see you from this way. Let me see you from that way. And it's.

23:12Ariel Zachow: I'm thankful that we live in a time where all of this can migrate online, but it's still weird. It's still sort of like this weird parallel universe that we're living in.

23:25Jimmy Clare: What made you want to go to a vegan lifestyle anyway?

23:30Ariel Zachow: Several years ago, I did this, I don't know, it was like a three-week health cleanse. I just wanted to try it out, lose a little bit of weight. And so we did it and it slowly progresses you from a standard American diet to a vegan diet over the course of the three weeks and then you can decide what you do at the end of it. So the first time I did it, I was like, Oh, I don't really need meat. That's not something that I require for my diet. So I went vegetarian. And when I was about 14 years old, I had this weird heart thing. I saw a bunch of different cardiologists. I've been on different kinds of medication for it. I even had heart surgery at one time and I never got a diagnosis. I never got any sort of direction as to what the issue was, what the potential side effects were, how to fix it. But I noticed as I started to change my diet, when I went vegetarian, the issue, the weird things that were happening with my heart diminished pretty significantly. And after a little less than a year of being vegetarian, I thought, well, it's not that big of a jump to go vegan. So let me try that. And I went vegan and now whatever it was, I'd never got an actual diagnosis. It's virtually gone. And so it's something that I was eating, some animal product that I was consuming was causing issues in my body. And when I cut them out, it went away. And so it sort of stuck with me. Then right about the same time, I started to do my yoga teacher training. And there's this idea in yoga, it's called ahimsa, and it translates to nonviolence and sort of expands to compassion and kindness towards all living creatures. And to me, that means vegan. So now I have a vegan diet. I don't buy leather and things like that. Even the tattoos I get, I make sure that the ink is vegan because that's not always vegan. And so it just stuck and it just felt natural. And now it's sort of like the basis, I guess, for everything I do is this idea of ahimsa, of compassion and kindness. So now here I am four or five years later, I'm still going strong.

25:47Jimmy Clare: I don't think I could do that.

25:50Ariel Zachow: It always seems much harder than you think. Like this morning, I actually just posted on my Instagram, it's I had waffles for breakfast with vegan eggs and vegan sausage. And the taste is different. You can't eat a vegan alternative to something and expect it to taste exactly the same. But it's pretty great. And there's so many options. Like I eat cheese every day, vegan cheese every day. I don't find that I'm lacking for anything. To go from point A to point B can seem like a big jump. But I thought it was great. I like it. And now I travel for vegan food. And it's just an excuse to go explore the world just to go eat more delicious things.

26:35Jimmy Clare: Yeah, well, that might be a long time before you can go back out again.

26:40Ariel Zachow: Well, yeah. Well, now I'm eating the vegan things in my home and I'll just, you know, pretend I'm traveling.

26:47Jimmy Clare: You know, you need one of those green screens.

26:49Ariel Zachow: I, you know what, I feel like that would be a great investment for my life. It's really hard to run a travel blog when no one's allowed to leave their house.

27:00Jimmy Clare: Green screen, here I come.

27:12Jimmy Clare: How many clients do you have for your personal training?

27:16Ariel Zachow: That is a little bit up in the air right now. Before I started to travel, I had about five. Primarily, I do group trainings, but most of my clientele is older. They're 60 and above. So to say to them, we're going to train on the internet, they're like, that's not a thing. So it's a little rough to get them transitioned. But as I travel, as I'm sort of reorganizing my life, I'm shifting more towards the podcast that I run and doing a little more one-on-one yoga therapy-based things. So slowly, personal training is sort of pushing off for me. I just find with my client base, it's not as seamless as I want it to be to pull it online. So as a business person, you have to shift and decide where your time is better spent. So now I'm sort of exploring the yoga therapy side of it. But I'm still in schooling for that. So that's a little slower than I want.

28:26Jimmy Clare: You make everything look so easy though.

28:28Ariel Zachow: I – well, it's a false. It's not true. But thank you. I think the best part about it and I do have to say I'm in a very – I'm definitely in a place of privilege to be able to experiment a lot with my business and to have the ability to travel and to afford to be able to sort of find my footing as an entrepreneur. But I – it's fun. My dad always said when we were young to go out and fail. And I always thought what a weird thing for a parent to say to a kid. You would think that you would want your child to succeed. And as time went on and as I got older, I started to realize that success and learning come from failure. And if you never, ever fail, you're not really learning anything. So I've made it my goal to try as many things as I possibly can. And if they fail, it's almost a cause for celebration because I've learned all of the reasons why that failed and what needs to change to move forward. So it's – I mean, maybe it comes off as looking easy but it's really – it's fun for me and I'm lucky that I get to see a bunch of failures as fun. I think it's sort of a valuable life lesson to be able to say, all right, well, that was a total disaster but here's what I learned and let's – well, I'll try this next thing. Maybe that'll work. Maybe not.

29:57Jimmy Clare: I think we, you need to get, I think I'm going to have to have you back on this podcast. I'm this.

30:05Ariel Zachow: It took a long time. I spent my entire childhood thinking my dad hated me because he wanted me to fail. But you start to, it's really like a total mindset shift to just, it's just this little flip of a switch. And when you get it figured out, it's freeing and it's super liberating. And it's weird though. It's unusual. It's not like a normal thought pattern to be like, oh, well, this was a huge disaster. Cool. What can I learn from it? Sometimes you even need to take a day and just be sad that something didn't work or disappointed that what you thought was going to be your success is not. But to get to that point of, okay, well, what are my takeaways? What are my lessons learned here? It's really life changing and you can apply it to every part of your life. It doesn't have to be business specifically. It can be relationships or friendships or studies or vacations even.

31:09Ariel Zachow: It takes a minute to get there, but it's worth trying.

31:18Jimmy Clare: I probably have to admit this now that it only took me nine times just to get a website up and running.

31:24Ariel Zachow: But how much did you learn from those first eight? A ton, right? So the ninth time that you did it, you're so far ahead of the game because you have that history of failure in learning.

31:37Jimmy Clare: Well, I knew one thing that I will never use WordPress ever again.

31:41Ariel Zachow: Oh, do not. Nope. Everybody run from WordPress. I'm on it and I want to rip my hair out.

32:37Jimmy Clare: So why did you pick Compassion as my compass as your business name?

32:44Ariel Zachow: It goes back directly to the practice of Ahimsa, compassion and kindness. One of my tattoos is the Sanskrit word. And it just, because it was

33:01Ariel Zachow: so intertwined with my set of morals, I use Ahimsa as my moral compass. So, smushed it all together, you get compassion as my compass.

33:12Ariel Zachow: Mmm.

33:13Ariel Zachow: Which is a mouthful, I realized for a business name, but there's only so many websites available. So I had slim pickins.

33:22Jimmy Clare: Is that too long? How long is that anyway?

33:25Ariel Zachow: It takes a minute to write out for sure.

33:30Jimmy Clare: Oh well, someone said that about a crazy fitness guy and yet here I am.

33:36Ariel Zachow: No, I think it's good because yours is super memorable and it's not 12,000 letters long, which is great.

33:43Jimmy Clare: Just out of curiosity,

33:46Jimmy Clare: How many, overall, how many clients do you say you would have in total?

33:52Ariel Zachow: Presently less than 10. It's a super bizarre time for my business with the travel, the relocation. Getting time zones to line up when I was traveling was an absolute nightmare. But I'm freshly on a new platform called Moxie, M-O-X-I-E. And it's a way to stream classes, essentially, and all of the classes are listed publicly, which is a new venture for me. So with that, and I'm only a week in and hasn't been very long at all, but it's pulling in new clients for every class, only about one or two new clients per class. But it's definitely interesting. I highly recommend taking Moxie. A lot of the classes are donation-based or free, so you don't have to pay for them. Less great for an instructor, more great for the student. But it's a weird limbo time for me. I'm definitely doing not specifically a rebrand, but a total directional change. Because to live in Europe and to have a client base mostly in the US, even between coasts, is difficult. A three-hour time difference for a morning class is a big deal. So less than 10 now, hopefully a million by next year.

35:23Jimmy Clare: Yeah.

39:35Jimmy Clare: information.

39:40Ariel Zachow: Then you just send them over to my Moxie page and we'll all hang out.

39:47Jimmy Clare: Is it a user-friendly platform?

39:51Ariel Zachow: I think so. Don't ask my mom because she had a really hard time. She was really cranky about it. For the parents. Well, I know I wasn't going to say that to her, but I implied it. I think it's great. It's interactive, but it sort of controls the volume for you. I previously was teaching on Zoom and it's just a little, I don't know, it's a little harder to get everything organized on Zoom, I found. You as an instructor pay a fee of the, or a percentage of the money you make. You are not paying a monthly fee, which is really great for people that are starting out and you don't have a lot of money to burn. I highly recommend it. I think it's great, but there's a ton of competition for it too. There's a ton of sites that are very similar. So if you're teaching, if you're thinking about teaching, start with Moxie. It's great. I highly recommend it. The customer service is exceptional, but there's at least five other major platform options for you. But it's a good way to pull in new clients that you wouldn't have otherwise.

41:03Jimmy Clare: Oh, well that's good to know. May I'll keep that in the mail. I'll write that down later.

41:04Ariel Zachow:

41:07Ariel Zachow: Yeah, it's moxie.xyz. So it's a whole bunch of weird letters all shoved together.

41:11Jimmy Clare: Mm-mm.

41:16Jimmy Clare: Isn't that pretty much every brand though?

41:18Ariel Zachow: It's yeah. And as people are running out of dot com, the endings are getting unique.net.org.tv.

41:23Jimmy Clare: you

41:28Jimmy Clare: And then you have the abbreviated ones on social media. That's Z-A-B. I don't know.

41:34Ariel Zachow: Yeah, well and then you travel and you find that other countries don't necessarily use dot com. It's like dot ca dot gr. Oh god, I need like a whole booklet to remember this.

41:46Jimmy Clare: Somebody needs to write a blog post about this.

41:48Ariel Zachow: It's true. I'll do it. I'll put that on my to-do list for today.

41:53Jimmy Clare: Yeah, send it to me when you're done. Yeah.

41:57Jimmy Clare: is too much.

41:58Ariel Zachow: Well, it's on WordPress, so don't hold your breath. I might not be able to get it up.

42:02Jimmy Clare: Oh, that's true. It might fall off. It's true.

42:05Ariel Zachow: It's gonna just go off into never never land.

42:09Jimmy Clare: Twilight Zone. I just quoted them. Whoops. I'll take it out of my podcast.

42:21Jimmy Clare: What do you think is one of the hardest times before running your own business, before the whole coronavirus?

42:32Jimmy Clare: That's just extra.

42:33Ariel Zachow: Hmm. Well, yeah, that's its own beast.

42:38Ariel Zachow: I think finding, at least for me, finding my footing has been the most difficult part. There's a lot of things that I'm passionate about that I want to be able to integrate into my business. But there is such a thing as too much. So it's been a couple of years of me looking at all of the things that I love, that I want to be able to do and cutting ties almost with the things that don't really work. While I do have the mindset of failures are opportunities for learning, it's still...

43:19Ariel Zachow: It's still hard sometimes to know that I'm however many years in now and I'm not like the wild, crazy success that I had hoped I would be at this point. But companies don't start that way. Apple, Google, Weight Watchers, nobody started their business and then was an instant success. But you don't really hear about the beginning difficult part. So it's this being able to find your footing and keep going when it's hard and when you're not hitting the milestones that you want, I think were the biggest and still are the biggest challenges for me. But I know that this is where I want to be. I know that this is what I want to do. And it's just a matter of failing and shifting and failing and shifting until I do find that success. Some days easier than others. But it's interesting. It's definitely an interesting journey. It is not for the weak of heart, that's for sure.

45:02Jimmy Clare: So you're saying that you're doing too many things at once. I only run my 20 different social media platforms.

45:12Ariel Zachow: It's so hard. And it's so hard to be like, I know that YouTube is a big one. Like everybody needs a YouTube channel. And I know that that's something that I need to do. But it's as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to say, now is not the time. I don't have all these other things organized right now. So I got to wait a minute. And that forcing myself to wait a minute is super hard.

45:40Jimmy Clare: I know how that feeling goes. Every time I find a new tool, I feel like I just jump right in. And I was like, Oh, I'm going to go do this. And unfortunately, I just did that and now I have 18 plus.

45:41Ariel Zachow: and

45:55Ariel Zachow: Yeah, it's hard. And when you get to a point where you can start to outsource, that's great. And you can have a bunch of platforms. And it's hard too in the beginning when you're getting yourself set up to know you need these, let's say 15 things, and you want to be able to build them all at the same time and at the same pace. But that's not how it works. Companies have huge departments to do all of these different things. And when you're a solo person, you are all of those departments in one.

46:31Jimmy Clare: Yeah.

46:32Jimmy Clare: I wear six million different hats every single day.

46:35Ariel Zachow: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

46:42Jimmy Clare: Yoga is... RIP, bro. I can't balance with all these hats.

46:46Ariel Zachow: I can't balance with all these hats. It's definitely an exercise.

47:00Jimmy Clare: What do you think you most enjoy about running your own business?

47:06Ariel Zachow: Hmm, that's tough. There's a lot of parts of it that I really love. So SMH.

47:12Ariel Zachow: Just to be super honest. I like that I'm in charge. Nobody's telling me what to do. That is super appealing. I actually worked very, very briefly at a gym in the town that I live in now and I had a couple of personal training clients. I wasn't there for very long. One of the women that I just loved, we became friends immediately when we started training together. She left one day without re-signing and this gym was very expensive. The prices they charge for personal training are astronomical. She's a retiree. Her income is very limited and she was unable to re-sign at that time. She walks out the door and my manager immediately grabbed me and pulled me aside and said, you just let $450 walk out the door. I thought, she has a name. Her name is Diana. Here's her financial situation. When she gets that sorted, if she decides she wants to come back, then she'll re-sign it. But it was this idea of you have to have philanthropy.

48:20Ariel Zachow: People at the gym were not seeing the gym goers as individuals. They were seeing them as dollar signs. And that felt so nasty to me that I was out. I quit the next day and I started my own business. I'm not going to be a part of something that doesn't follow my set of morals. And I don't view people as paychecks. I view them as people because that's my job and that's what I'm all about. So to not have to face a situation like that again where there's a total discrepancy in what the goal is, I think is the most appealing part of having your own business. And there's a lot of hard stuff that comes with it. But to me, it's worth all of the difficulties to be able to say, I see you as a person. I don't see you as a dollar sign because I can't support that. I can't back that. So that I think to me is my most favorite part, the most appealing part.

49:21Jimmy Clare: Gee, I wonder why we get along very well, because I totally agree.

49:27Jimmy Clare: I totally don't like that every single company, or all end companies Bushel has,

49:34Ariel Zachow: Mm-hmm.

49:35Jimmy Clare: Let me rephrase that. Not every single company is like that, but...

49:39Jimmy Clare: maybe a big handful, maybe two big handfuls of companies are like that, especially

49:49Jimmy Clare: Planet Fitness recently just did that to customers that since they can't even go to the gym, they kept on charging people. But we definitely forgiven them.

49:59Ariel Zachow: Yeah, that's nice. And you know, it can be argued that that is a way to run a business and it does make you money. But you have to decide, as an individual, can you support that? Are you okay with that? And if the answer is yes, then do whatever you want. But if you want to have a like a true human experience, I think, and if you want to be a good moral person, you have to treat people with compassion. And you don't do that by not knowing their name, knowing them only for the size of the personal training package they buy.

49:59Jimmy Clare: Yeah, that's nice.

50:37Jimmy Clare: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

50:41Jimmy Clare: Just recently I had a, I'm not going to say any names.

50:49Jimmy Clare: or call me by the wrong name. And I was first seeing a complaint about.

50:53Ariel Zachow: Mm-hmm.

50:56Jimmy Clare: intellectual property theft. And they, and they call me by a different name that I don't know how they even got that name mixed up, even though I introduced myself within like the first 10 words of email. And I was like, well, that person can't read.

51:19Jimmy Clare: And I feel like that.

51:22Jimmy Clare: they really only saw me as just a complaining customer. Absolutely. And not really an actual person. And they're just like, oh, well, we don't really care of who you are. And I kind of feel like that's kind of why I based my brand on a little bit. I'm basically trying to keep everything like up in front of my website. So you know what's happening. And it's like, here's what I collect. Here's what I don't collect. Here's everything is out in the open. This is free. This is paid. There's no gimmicks. There's no tricks. It's not hidden. It's in plain view. Transparency is key.

51:27Ariel Zachow: Absolutely.

51:52Ariel Zachow: Yeah.

52:09Ariel Zachow: Well, and when you have solid customer service like that, people are going to notice and they're going to care. I think that everybody listening now can think of a time when they've had a great customer service experience and you remember that and you get brand loyalty when you feel like you're a valued person. And that's how I want my clients to feel. I want them to feel like they're part of my family. They're part of my circle. And maybe that slows me down in terms of earning potential in the beginning, but I'm not going to sell my morals for a paycheck.

52:46Jimmy Clare: I can't sleep at night if I'm kind of a person.

52:50Ariel Zachow: Absolutely.

52:52Ariel Zachow: Right, right, yeah.

52:54Jimmy Clare: especially

52:56Jimmy Clare: I'll give you one more example of this. So, I recently, I had a little...

53:05Jimmy Clare: kind of a hiccup on social media of sharing one of my...

53:11Jimmy Clare: I have a guest post on my website.

53:14Jimmy Clare: Mm-hmm.

53:15Jimmy Clare: and

53:16Jimmy Clare: Apparently, I didn't, I didn't have, I only had a

53:22Jimmy Clare: an affiliate disclaimer. I didn't have the health and wellness disclaimer out in person. And someone said that this should have been stated, this, this and this. And I said to the person, you're absolutely right. I should have. I don't know everything about internet law. I never claimed that whatsoever. If I did, I'd be a lawyer. And probably making a boatload of money. But it's not. But yeah, I said to the person, you're absolutely right. And now what I've been doing for many, many months, I've been going back through all my posts, even the poorly, poorly written posts that I'm going to redo. And I'm by really poorly. And I'm not going to do that again.

53:26Ariel Zachow: Mm.

54:14Jimmy Clare: the titles don't even make sense. The paragraphs are just horribly written. It is thrown together like I thought I knew how to write a blog post. And I admit that because, you know, it's just too... I can't lie about how bad it is. It's just bad.

54:34Ariel Zachow: The learning curve posts. Everybody's got them.

54:37Jimmy Clare:

54:47Jimmy Clare: on my grade post, but then probably middle 2019 to 2017 is terrible. That's a steep learning curve.

55:02Ariel Zachow: We've all got it. We all go at different paces.

55:07Jimmy Clare: I, I, I...

55:08Jimmy Clare: Every time I see all your posts on social media, I don't think it's kind of funny. It's like

55:15Jimmy Clare: I don't think she ever makes a mistake.

55:18Ariel Zachow: That's so funny you say that. It is absolute chaos behind the scenes. It's just see like smoke is coming out of my head as I craft these posts and I'm like crying to my friends, like I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm glad that nobody knows that part. Well.

55:36Ariel Zachow: Not until now, at least, I guess.

55:40Jimmy Clare: If I could say that everything runs perfectly from my end, I'd be lying.

55:46Ariel Zachow: Well, I think anybody would, even these big, massive companies, even, you know, big influencers, even. I don't think anybody actually knows what they're doing.

55:57Jimmy Clare: Well, it's just like I hadn't...

56:01Jimmy Clare: I had a newsletter scheduled to come out July 1st. Well, I had a newsletter scheduled to come out July 1st.

56:09Jimmy Clare: I came back from my nine day vacation. It wasn't sent out. And my lovely newsletter company, I'm not gonna name any names. I really want to.

56:22Jimmy Clare: But they lost my email on me, the newsletter on me. And I was like, I want compensation. They was like, we have to wait for higher up support to get back to us. And I was like, is that an excuse to give me something for free that you lost?

56:25Jimmy Clare: the new side of me.

56:38Ariel Zachow: Right, yeah.

56:41Jimmy Clare: Apparently they didn't want to give me something for free. Yeah.

56:52Jimmy Clare: Do you think...

56:55Jimmy Clare: Could you ever see yourself ever?

56:58Jimmy Clare: of not running your own business.

57:04Ariel Zachow: I think the only time that would happen if I just found like a suitcase full of money and I didn't have to work anymore. I don't personally and there's nothing wrong with this. It's just not for me. I don't think that I could ever work for somebody else again. I could maybe see myself doing some sort of collaboration, but I like being in charge. I like kind of knowing that things are going to go a way that is acceptable to me. The way that that happens is I'm in charge. With that, I accept the potentially incredible difficulties that come with that, but I never want to put myself in a position where I'm not valued and my clients are not valued. For me, that means I run my own business until I get super rich and then I'm just going to live on a yacht or something super cool.

58:08Jimmy Clare: So where can people find you on social media?

58:12Ariel Zachow: On Instagram, compassion.as.my.compass, long, or my website, compassionasmycompass.com. My podcast as well, under the same name, compassionasmycompass.

58:28Jimmy Clare: Do you have any other last few words you want to talk about?

58:33Ariel Zachow: Embrace failure. I think those are my, that's my final thought. Find a way to embrace it. It's hard. It's a journey. You're going to mess it up a bunch of times. Life is hard. Don't let it be harder than it needs to be. And if you can take something that's maybe not ideal and find a positive in it, I think it's worth a little, a little effort to do so.

58:59Jimmy Clare: Are you sure you don't want to just work on my podcast from now on? Because you make it so... You put everything so much better than I do.

59:12Ariel Zachow: Oh, on the outside. On the inside, still chaos. Still constant chaos.

59:19Jimmy Clare: I think by the, maybe, let's say, maybe sometime, maybe at the end of the year, I get you back on because I enjoy all this time with you. Oh, thank you.

59:33Ariel Zachow: Oh, thank you so much.

59:36Ariel Zachow: Yeah, this was awesome. This was a lot of fun.

59:36Jimmy Clare: Yeah.

59:38Jimmy Clare: and I was on your podcast.

59:44Ariel Zachow: About a year ago. Yeah, you were one of my firsts and I just passed a year, maybe like a month or two ago.

59:51Jimmy Clare: Geez, I'm only been up and running for, my podcast has only been up for three months.

59:56Ariel Zachow: Oh, so you're in the good stages. This is the fun part.

01:00:03Jimmy Clare: Well, I hope I can stay in touch with you.

01:00:05Ariel Zachow: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, definitely do.

01:00:08Jimmy Clare: good that you were able to make it. Yes. I felt like I was interning to get you on here.

01:00:14Ariel Zachow: Well, it was moving. It's been chaos. My life is chaos right now.

01:00:19Jimmy Clare: You're preaching to the choir. Yeah.

01:00:21Ariel Zachow: Yeah. The whole world is kind of chaos right now.

01:00:25Jimmy Clare: Well, have fun packing.

01:00:28Ariel Zachow: Thank you, I will. I'll talk to you soon.

01:00:31Ariel Zachow: Bye.