We were in Cozumel, Mexico back in January of this year. I was laying on the beach and Jeff had ran up to the room to grab me some more sunscreen. You know, at age 33 you gotta be worried about wrinkles.

Ahem.

I thought I’d check my email from my phone since I was all alone on the beach. And when I went to refresh my inbox there was a message from J.D. Roth – who used to be the site owner of GetRichSlowly.org.

For those of you who have never heard of Get Rich Slowly…I’ll tell you this, my hubs was star struck by J.D. when we went to our FIRST ever FINCON over 3 years ago. Ha! He’s kind of a big deal in the personal finance space. Not to mention he sold his site for LOTS of money.

The email said that he was wondering if Jeff and I would like to be keynote speakers at an upcoming conference in San Diego called Digital Co-Lab.

I literally thought he accidentally included my name in there because, really, why would they want ME to speak? I’ve never spoke at any conference before let-alone given a keynote speech.

I, of course, thought I’d just tell Jeff to go ahead and tell him that he’d do it, but that I wasn’t qualified enough. But before my husband even returned from his sunscreen run…I got another email, this time from my husband, saying, “Sure, we’d LOVE to!” 

Sure, we’d love to??????

Insert me having a slight panic attack while laying by the ocean.

When he finally came back to the beach chairs I almost wanted to punch him.

I said, “Did you really just tell him that I’d be a keynote speaker with you????? REALLY??”

Him: “HECK YAY! YOU’RE GONNA ROCK IT!”

The only thing that made me feel okay about it was that it wasn’t until June (which at the time was 6 months away). I knew if I had time to prepare that I would feel a little better.

But you know what happened in between our Mexico trip and the beginning of summer?

LIFE happened. That’s what.

Before I knew it…it was May and we hadn’t planned ANY of our speech.

I was feeling like a hot mess. But Jeff? He was not one bit worried.

As you can probably imagine, May and June were spent stressing out about how we were gonna pull this off. We managed to rehearse it numerous times before we left for the conference, but not as many as I would have liked.

I joked that I might pee my pants on stage. But, literally, if you’ve had kids ladies…you know I wasn’t really joking.

Thankfully I didn’t wet myself, and I didn’t go blank on stage (another fear of mine).

We were the opening keynote on Friday morning so Thursday night I got absolutely NO sleep. I woke up at 2:00 am and never went back to sleep. Haha!

When I tell you that I’m a psycho…I mean it.

But when our talk was over? It felt amazing! Amazing because I had just accomplished something that I never thought I could.

We got to spend time with some of the most amazing people, including a lot of the other speakers: Chris Ducker, Pat Flynn and Paula Pant. All who are wonderful online entrepreneurs that inspire me! Plus, I got to meet all kinds of NEW friends!

A huge THANKS to Leslie Samuel (the funny dude above on the right) for praying for me RIGHT before Jeff and I took the stage.

I remember that when he interviewed us for his podcast that he began by saying a quick prayer so I immediately ran up to him about 3 minutes before we went live and asked him to pray for me. He was so gracious enough to say OF COURSE!! I know that prayer made a huge difference in my ability to get through our talk!

My Aunt and Uncle live in San Diego too so we were able to take our day 2 lunch break to meet them!

I always love being able to catch up with them and hear my Crazy Uncle Ron’s stories about how him, my dad and their oldest brother remind them so much of our boys!

The fact that Toni, Andrea and Erin, the 3 amazing women who run Digital Co-Lab, trusted ME to speak at their conference was really something I didn’t take lightly.

I’m forever grateful for the opportunity, even if it did make me want to pee my pants. Sometimes going out of our comfort zone is when we see the most growth in our lives and this experience was no different. I already feel like I can do things I never could!

I teased during the presentation that Jeff Rose only agreed to come to the conference because San Diego had In-N-Out Burger. I was really only half joking.

Our first stop after we arrived in California? You guessed it. It was quite an expensive cab ride, but luckily after we got to our hotel we learned about Uber. Which, by the way, if you don’t know about the Uber app? Download it. Wayyyyy cheaper than a cab ride.

Jeff keeps asking me if I’m ready to give another talk…

MY ANSWER IS NO. LOL! That was amazingly fun, but my nerves need 365 days to recover.