Arlene Battishill is a Business Dominatrix. She broke all the rules to become the highly sought-after consultant she is today. She shares the brutal truth of what it means to sell online and how you can have brilliant success no matter how big or small you are. Arlene used her nerves of steel when she appeared on the TV show Shark Tank promoting her brilliant motorcycle riders’ protective and fashionable gear called GoGo Gear. She is the best-selling author of Retail Shock Therapy: A Prescription For What Ails Your Online Sales. If you feel stuck in your business or your life, Arlene may just be your recipe for success.

Contact Info

• Website: www.ArleneBattishill.com
• Podcast: What's Your Next Move: http://arlenebattishill.com/podcast-episodes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArleneBadAssBattishill
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessdominatrix/

Most Influential Person

• None

Effect on Emotions

• Oh my God. Mindfulness has been absolutely huge because in the most stressful situations in life, which are all compliments of being an entrepreneur. My emotions have allowed me to self-regulate and to keep myself as calm as possible in every situation and I faced some pretty traumatic circumstances in my business and in my life and I've always looked at them in a way where it's, what do we need to do? What's my next move in this situation? So mindfulness has been critical for me.

Thoughts on Breathing

• Like I said before, if I couldn't ride my bike, I wouldn't be able to breathe and breathing was really critical to my being able to deal with my debilitating flying anxiety.
• I think breathing, more than anything else, is the number one thing that people must be doing when they are trying to get of themselves.

Suggested Resources

• Book: Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. Schwartz
• Book: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• App: Listening to music

Bullying Story

• When we talk about bullying, I won't say that I experienced bullying in the way we see it today. When I was in high school I was in a situation where I had people threatening me and this was in the seventies. I grew up in Detroit and there were was a lot of racial conflict at that time.
• There was a TV show called Roots that came on. It was a mini-series with LaVar Burton, I think in 1976 or 1977.
• There was tremendous conflict between the African American students and the white students in all of the schools in Detroit because we had come out of the race riots and the violence of the police against African Americans in the late sixties.
• And we moved into the seventies and we experienced something called white flight where a judge ruled that all of the city schools must be integrated or desegregated. So now they were busing white kids into black schools and black kids into white schools.
• And the amount of violence that was going on in the schools at that time was just unheard of. And I was one of the white students that was taken out of an all-white school.
• This was completely random. It's just like they picked your name out of a hat and you had to go. And so I was taken out of an all-white high school and moved over to an all-black high school and there were six white kids in my graduating class.
• And I had an instance where I was in a locker room. I was asked to come be the token on the basketball team and I couldn't play basketball to save my life.
• But there I was and apparently, some kids had done something and they got in trouble for it and they thought I told on them.
• So one of the other basketball players came over and she grabbed one of these metal cages where we would put our clothes in lockers and she picked it up and started shoving it in my face. You know, saying that I was the one who did it.
• And I kept pleading with her saying, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, but when you're in a situation like that you know, you're guilty until further proven guilty.
• What I knew in that moment is I had been, up till that moment in my life, someone who was very much a diplomat, even though I'm telling everybody to f**k off, it was always around doing the right thing and you never caused harm to people.
• And I was very much about justice and making sure that people treated each other properly. And I spent most of my time in that situation, pleading with her to get her to understand who I was and to see me properly and to know that I would never do something like that because that's just not who I am.
• But the circumstances were such that it was such an incendiary environment that there was nothing I could do. And so the remainder of the year I was pretty much alienated from the rest of the students and I'd try and engage them, but you know, there was nothing I could do.
• And so I just kind of went about my business, but I think the thing with mindfulness and a situation like that is when you know yourself well enough and you feel really rock solid in who you are and you have a moral compass and a guide that is all about knowing what it is the right thing to do in a situation.
• I didn't have a real problem with that because I always knew who I was and maybe that's why early on I could tell people to go f**k off because, you know, they were not going to tell me something and they're not gonna blow smoke up my ass. I wasn't going to have any part of it because I knew exactly what they were doing.
• And so that, that's been kind of a guiding principle for me throughout my whole life, which is all about being mindful of other people and behaving in a way that's respectful of them and always working toward finding a way where we can work together so that everybody wins.
• Because I don't believe that it's beneficial in life for people to lose as a result of what someone else has done.
• Competition is one thing, but when people are losing in life because somebody else gets to win, that doesn't work for me.

Free Gift

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