IAM1599 – Relationship Coach, Published Author and International Speaker Supports Married Couples in Building Happy and Healthy Marriages

Monique Melton is a relationship coach, published author, and international speaker. The heart of her work is to support married couples in building happy and healthy marriages. She travels the world speaking at conferences and events on topics related to personal growth, marriage, and relationships. She’s been published in magazines, featured in blogs and podcasts, and has touched the lives of people all over the world. She is a natural big-bold dreamer and a deeply rooted woman of faith. She is a proud Navy wife to her high-school sweetheart and she is a loving mother to two little ones.

• CEO Story: Even when she was a kid, Monique had a little hustle. Started her entrepreneurship right out of college, being a professional makeup artist, and did that for a decade. In 2014, she shifted to a more purposeful calling, which is business and relationship coaching. Helping clients doing business development and marketing strategy. Most of the coaching conversation involves personal development and relationship components, well suited for Monique’s educational background which is Psychology and counseling. The more she focused on relationships, believing that ultimately life is about relationships.
• Business Service: Relationship coaching. Individuals struggling with confidence, mindset issues, and anxiety that affect clients' everyday lives. Public speaking.
• Secret Sauce: Keeping things simple, not overcomplicating things. Having Spirituality in your marriage – accepting that there is someone bigger than you.
• CEO Hack: Planning and sharing schedules as a family (2) Sharing notes on to-do lists through iPhone
• CEO Nugget: Growth hurts; it's uncomfortable and you have to be okay with it because the end results are amazing
• CEO Defined: A leader who is also willing to be led. One who is committed and bears the responsibility of giving the best to the community.

Website: www.moniquemelton.com

Book: EntrepreFriendships: Step-by-Step Guide to Make More Meaningful Connections, Earn Greater Business Opportunities, and Develop Real Business Relationships

Instagram: moemotivate
Facebook: Moemotivate

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Transcription

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00:31 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share precisely the information you're searching for. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Monique Melton of moniquemelton.com. Monique, it's awesome to have you on the show.

01:05 – Monique Melton

Thank you for having me.

01:07 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Thanks for being here. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Monique so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Monique is a relationship coach, published author, and international speaker. The heart of her work is to support people in building happy and healthy relationships. She travels the world speaking at conferences and events on topics related to personal growth, marriage, and relationships.

She's been published in magazines, featured in blogs and podcasts, and has touched the lives of people all over the world. She's a natural, big, bold dreamer, and a deeply rooted woman of faith. She is a proud Navy wife to her high school sweetheart, and she is a loving mother to two little ones. Monique, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:46 – Monique Melton

Yeah.

01:47 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's do it. So the first question I had was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

01:54 – Monique Melton

Great. I feel like entrepreneurship has been, you know, some people say this like you're just made for this. I feel like that's what my story's been because even since I was a kid, I always had, like, a little hustle. But I started my entrepreneurial endeavors officially, like, you know, LLC and all that kind of stuff right out of college. I was actually a professional Makeup artist. I did that for about a decade. After I had my daughter, she's my youngest, I just knew I wanted to do something different and did a lot of soul searching and really thought about the type of purpose that I wanted or the type of legacy I wanted to build and the impact I want to have around me and all that.

I started back in November 2014 doing business and relationship coaching. So I did a lot of business development for clients and helped them with their marketing strategy. But what I found in doing that is that most of our conversations, if not almost all of our conversations with my clients, involve some type of personal development relationship component.

My educational background is in psychology and counseling, and so I yield very easily to that subject matter. The more I work with clients, and the more I do that work, the more I decide that I want to focus on relationships. Because I think ultimately that's what life is about. Relationships, whether that be our relationship with God or our relationship.

Well, if you're not a person of faith, you know, that's neither here nor there, neither here nor there, but even just the relationship that you have with yourself and with others. I think a lot of the challenges that we experience in life can be rooted or directed right back to some type of relationship where there's unresolved pain. And so we go throughout life trying to interact with people, to save ourselves, protect ourselves. So I can help people to have happy or healthy relationships. I think we can have a greater and bigger impact on the world around us.

03:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's awesome that you devoted your work towards that because I think a lot of times when you're talking about business or you're talking about marriage or friendships or whatever, you kind of forget that it's people in the people's interactions and relationships with one another. But the fact that, like you said, like, you felt that was continuing to come up in the work that you were doing, so you decided to kind of devote your time to that and your business. So I know you touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to hear a little bit more on how you work with and serve the clients that you work with.

04:09 – Monique Melton

Yeah, so now that my focus is on relationships, I either have clients who are like, I work with couples, but a lot of times I'm working with the individual, the woman who's coming to me who's struggling with maybe confidence, some mindset issues, anxiety, not clinical anxiety. I always recommend people to see a therapist for things like that, but just Things that are affecting the way that she is going about her everyday life. Then as far as couples, often people come when things have completely fallen apart. I wish I could get people to look at their marriage almost like a car.

You don't drive it around, and then when all the gas is out, you're like, oh, man, I need to go to the gas station. Like, that would be a huge inconvenience. There are signals and things that your car tells you that something is wrong, and then you take it and go get it fixed. You don't wait till it's completely not even operable to go and repair it. It's a lot more work, It's a lot more time, It's a lot more energy. Sometimes you just read this is a new car. I just wish people would say, you know, I want to put my marriage in as a priority and make it more. Let's maintain our relationship. Let's address issues that come up when they're small.

Because if we don't address it when it's small, it's just gonna stay. It's not gonna go away. It's gonna become a bigger issue. So I do that for my one-on-one clients. I do either couples or women. Then I also, I also still have some business clients, but that's just because I'm currently rebranding. I do a lot of public speaking. I talk about personal growth, relationships, and diversity. I'm working on my second book right now, and I also have some resources like workbooks and guides and things on business and relationships on my website as well. So I have different ways to support people depending on where you're coming from and what you need. That's pretty much what I have right now.

06:02 – Gresham Harkless

That's awesome. I love the metaphor of the car making sure that, okay, this, the engine has failed or something for whatever reason. It means that that probably has built up over time. So you make sure that you take care of the things before they manifest themselves into what could be a bigger issue. So I love that you kind of focus on that and remind us of that, which. Definitely important.

06:21 – Monique Melton

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

06:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be like what you feel kind of distinguishes you or your organization, but what do you feel could be your secret sauce?

06:32 – Monique Melton

Okay. So I love cupcakes. Well, I love anything sweet, honestly. So I like to use the acronym sweet a lot. I use that Even with my business clients and it's the stuff for creating your brand story, wealth, client experience, exceptional marketing, and team. I kind of created a new approach to use, like taking a spin-off of that to work with couples and working with relationship coaching. I would definitely say that my secret sauce is that I like to keep things very simple. I think sometimes we overcomplicate things and like to throw in all these different steps and tools and I gotta have this, I gotta have that, I gotta have this in order for the relationship to be healthy.

But it really doesn't have to be that complicated. You can have some key components in your relationship, then you can build from there, you know. So definitely in my opinion, you want to have some level of spirituality. Just recognizing that there's something that's bigger than you. It's not just people out here just walking around willy-nilly. So that's a big thing. But I also think having a working commitment towards your own personal growth and understanding that I am responsible for myself. I can't make my husband responsible for my own happiness because that's a heavy responsibility.

It's also impossible. You can certainly contribute to how someone feels and all those kinds of things, but ultimately I'm the one who is responsible for my emotions, for my decisions, and all of that. So that's working towards your own personal growth. Effective communication is hands down probably one of the most important things for a relationship. If I'm saying things in a way that you don't understand, but you're taking them one way and I'm taking it another, that's going to cause so much friction and chaos.

Instead of letting that marinate and just turn into something else, let's communicate effectively. And there's all different ways to go about effective communication. That's one of the big things I do when I am working with couples. But even just working with my one-on-one clients because of the way they're communicating with themselves, you know, how are you talking to yourself? Are you engaging in negative self-talk or are you saying things to yourself that are more positive and aligned with who you really are and what you want to accomplish?

That's the first e effective communication and then enjoying each other and having fun doing things outside of just the day to the day to day, you know, hustle and bustle. I have two kids, we have so many things going on all the time. We have to create that time to make sure that we are investing in us as a unit. Not just, what you have going on, what I have going on, but us together. So enjoying each other, laughing, growing together. Then the T. The last letter for Sweet is the team. Remember that you're on the same team. So I kept the team from the original acronym, where I did it originally, because a lot of times in a relationship if you feel like the person is against you, everything that they do, you're going to see it through that lens.

But if we're working on the same team, that means that if you make a mistake or, you know, if you think about, like, a football team and you bump into your teammate, if I know we're on the same team, I'm not going to take that as if you're the opponent trying to knock me down. It was. It was an accident. It was a mistake. And so when you think about, okay, we're on the same team, that means that I need to give you grace, I need to communicate with you, I need to make sure that I support you, I encourage you, I'm rooting for you. I want you to win because you win, I win.

I would say those all together are kind of like my secret sauce to helping people remember some of the components. There's more to having a healthy relationship, but those are some of the, like, main components when it comes to marriage, but even just friendships if you have a friend and you know that the two of you are on the same team, that means that you're rooting for each other, you want each other to succeed you. So that was a long answer, but that's pretty much what it is.

10:39 – Gresham Harkless

No, I appreciate you for sharing that, and I, too, have a sweet tooth, so that definitely resonated with me. So I appreciate you sharing that. Now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

10:55 – Monique Melton

Definitely planning, my schedule. My husband and I share our schedules with one another, and so that way he knows what I have going on, and I know what he has going on, although he doesn't have much going on outside of what we do as a family. So I'm usually the one who has a meeting here, an event here, all that. So I definitely think planning ahead we have certain days where we designate to go over our budget and go over our appointments and things that we have going on.

But with so many moving pieces, so many things to do and accomplish, sitting down and having a plan and putting it in a calendar is probably the best thing for sure. What I would add to that is we share a note on our iPhones that this is just such a simple, very practical thing, but it just helps us stay organized. That's our grocery list, and it's categorized by store and by section in the store.

So if my husband, if I'm like, hey, can you go to the grocery store today? He doesn't have to come home and get the list. Or I don't have to take a picture of the list that I wrote down because I used to do that. It's already on the phone. So it's just a way for us to be efficient and for us to keep the communication between one another really smooth and effective.

12:09 – Gresham Harkless

It makes perfect sense. Yeah, definitely leverage all this technology that we have out there. So it's good to hear that you guys are doing that to be effective and efficient. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. You might have already touched on this, but what would you tell your younger business self?

12:24- Monique Melton

My younger business self, I would tell my younger business self that growth hurts, it's uncomfortable, and it's a part of the process. I think initially when I started my business, I was really surprised by some of the growing pains. Had I just kind of anticipated that, like, becoming a mom you're going to have to change diapers? Like, you know that it's a part of the process. You're not shocked that you have to do that? It still stings. Like there's nothing pleasant about it, but at least you know that that's a part of it.

Whereas for me, I didn't anticipate that. I didn't anticipate some of the growing pains of building a team or dealing with it. Unfortunately, I hate to say it like this, but there are people who just want to sabotage you and don't want to see you win, and deal with that. I would tell my younger self that it's okay to be uncomfortable with the growing pains because they're not supposed to feel good, but the growth that comes after that is what is the reward. Just push through it. Don't give up, don't be discouraged. Go to your people who love you and let them encourage you and help you feel better. But keep going when it's, when it's all said and done.

13:31 – Gresham Harkless

Makes perfect sense. Yeah. Especially when you're getting out of your comfort zone. You have to be able to kind of understand that that's, that'll make you uncomfortable. Then to grow, you have to kind of have a little bit of pain to do that. So I think that was a great CEO nugget. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of being a CEO and we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:51 – Monique Melton

I believe being a CE CEO is someone who is a leader and is willing to also be led. Someone who is constantly committed to their own learning, their own development journey. I think the CEO sometimes gives the idea that, oh, I'm the one in charge. But with that comes a lot of responsibility to maintain good relationships, to have harmony in your life. I think being a CEO comes with a responsibility towards my business and what I'm doing. I need to make sure that I'm taking care of myself so that I can show up in the world and give my best.

I think also being a CEO means that I need to be very aware of the needs of the people in my community so that I can innovate and pivot when necessary. So keeping, you know, keeping that communication open is what's important. So ultimately, it's just being a person who's committed to being a leader in leading and serving the community that they are assigned to.

14:55 – Gresham Harkless

That makes perfect sense. I think that's an incredible definition. So, Monique, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best they can get ahold of you.

15:08- Monique Melton

Well, the easiest way to get a hold of me, is I'm on Instagram all the time, so you can find me at Mo Motivate. That's M O E Motivate. I would just also like to add for anyone who's listening, and maybe they're in a place where business isn't going the way that you hope, or maybe even you're thinking about starting a business, but you're afraid of some of the ups and downs that come along with it. I would just encourage anyone to remember that, life is so precious and we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring.

If we can just be intentional with the time that we do have and live it in a way that we can look back and be proud of the decisions that we are making, then I think that's what that's like, our service to ourselves and to one another. That means for me, being intentional with my time and what I'm doing is that I don't allow fear to dictate my choices, but that I instead say, you know what? Okay, fear, I see you. But I'm going to do this anyway because I know it's what's best for me what I'm working towards and the people that I serve. That's what I would add.

16:10 – Gresham Harkless

I love it. I love it. Yeah, that's an awesome reminder and pardon word of wisdom. But Monique, thank you so much and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:17 – Monique Melton

Thank you so much.

16:19 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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