Dr. Tim Clinton: Welcome into Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Dr. Tim Clinton, co-host of Family Talk. As a professional counselor and marriage and family therapist, I'm honored to serve alongside Dr. Dobson as the resident authority on mental health and relationships here at JDFI. I also serve as president of the American Association of Christian Counselors. Thank you for joining us. This weekend, myself and the Family Talk broadcast team are attending the Extraordinary Women Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's been an amazing couple of days here with thousands of women descending on the Mabee Center, eager to worship, connect, and to hear from powerful, God-fearing women. One of those extraordinary women is my guest today on the program. Her name, Alli Worthington. Let me tell you a little bit about Alli. Alli is an author, speaker, career coach, and founder of the Coach School.
She teaches women how to become more successful in their careers, businesses, and with entrepreneurial goals. As a part of her business, she started the Passion to Profit, which is a five lesson online on-demand video training course. Her entrepreneurial story begins in 2008 when her family lost everything. Her husband lost his job, they filed for bankruptcy. With 42 bucks in startup money and Google, Alli began building her own business. In 2008, she founded BlissDom and BlissDom Canada, which was the single largest international women's small business conference in the world. She also founded BlissDom Domestic, a digital publishing, content development and marketing company. Then in 2010, Ali co-founded the Blissful Media Group and served as the Chief Creative Officer until 2013. And from 2014 to 18, Alli served as the founding COO, chief operations officer and executive director of Propel Women, an online Christian leadership ministry.
Currently, she hosts a podcast called The Alli Worthington Show weekly, sitting down with friends to learn from, and then she provides coaching in a question and answer segment about faith, life, and business. Alli's been featured on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and she's the author of The Year of Living Happy, Fierce Faith, Breaking Busy, Standing Strong and an upcoming release we're going to talk about, Remaining You While Raising Them. Alli's married to Mark. They have five sons and reside in Tennessee with a golden retriever who doesn't like to retrieve. Alli, what a delight to have you here on Family Talk. We're so honored to have you. Dr. Dobson and his wife, Shirley, sent their regards.
Alli Worthington: Thank you. It's great to be here and it's an honor to be on the show. I got most of my parenting advice from Dr. Dobson back in the day with Bringing Up Boys.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Alli, what's it like to raise five boys?
Alli Worthington: It is really loud. It's a little bit smelly. It's messy, but with a lot of food, a lot of love, and a little discipline. It's pretty great.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I love that. Alli, you're going to be onstage here at Extraordinary Women in just a few moments. Hey, can you give us a little tease of what you're going to say, how you're going to encourage these women here?
Alli Worthington: Yeah. What I'm going to talk about today is how we are called by the Lord to really stand up and fight when we're in storms and we fight back with praise and worship. To not let the enemy beat us down when life is hard, when the storms of life come in and try to take us out, that God is calling us to be strong in Him and fight our battles one day at a time with Him until we get through.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I love that. Alli, you have quite a story. We're going to unpack that here in just a little bit, but God's put you in a place now where you're speaking across the country in front of a lot of audiences. You get to hear a lot of stories. What are you hearing primarily from women out on the frontline?
Alli Worthington: Women are worn down, really worn down from the last few years.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Yeah, I'm going to agree.
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I just walked out on stage a few minutes ago and just shared a piece from Dr. Dobson's heart. He said, "Tim, let them know that we see them, Shirley and I see them, and that they're loved and appreciated." I think in his heart, and I know he has been a champion from moms in particular saying, "Listen, what you do doesn't go unnoticed. It is everything." Hey, as we get started, I want to introduce you a little bit more to our audience. Share a little bit about maybe your upbringing, what kind of shaped that character and that fire that's inside of you.
Alli Worthington: Yeah. Only child, two young parents, stay home mom and a carpenter. My father unfortunately passed away tragically in a car accident right before I was age three. So left with a young daughter, my mom, a widow who really didn't have a great way to take care of us, struggled for years and years with grief and just putting food on the table. There weren't the opportunities 45 years ago for women to build a business and work from home and do all these things. So really struggled. The Lord sustained her. She loved the Lord. I joke that she's a bit of a hippie Christian, so we never went to church. So I didn't grow up in church culture, but I always grew up hearing about the Lord. But at the age of 16, I went to Christian school and fell in love with the Lord in a new way, and it was He and I for the rest of my life, and we've had a great adventure ever since.
Dr. Tim Clinton: You came in contact with a man who would later, two of you guys put your hands together, Mark.
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: And then these boys. What's it like with Mark and again, raising, you got a football team.
Alli Worthington: Well, it's funny. We met on a blind date and I told him on that blind date that I wanted five children, and it's amazing that he didn't run out the door and leave just a man shaped hole in the wall because that's a scary thing to hear on a blind date. But as I think back on it now, I think I always wanted this big family to maybe to make up for what I didn't have when I was a girl.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Wow.
Alli Worthington: So it's been very healing for me personally to be able to have this great family because I grew up thinking, "If I had that, wouldn't life be okay?" And so it's been a great honor to be able to get to have so many children and get to raise them with him. But it's been a healing process for me too.
Dr. Tim Clinton: 2008, as I look through your materials and have reflected on your story, was a year that everything changed. And I want to go back there. You and Mark, things are spinning and then came crashing down.
Alli Worthington: They sure did. Housing crisis, the recession, I like to joke that it hit us right before it hit everybody else. So Mark had lost his job at the end of 2007 and we really dug our heels in the ground that we wanted stay in Tennessee. So we lived on savings and he was applying for more jobs. I was pregnant with our fifth son. Right after I had our fifth son, he was five weeks old when we realized we were losing our house. So bankruptcy, lost our house, lost everything except for what fit into two little mobile storage units. And we picked up our whole family, moved in with my grandfather. We spent the summer, my grandfather didn't even have Wi-Fi or a day of cell coverage at his house, so we would drive to McDonald's playland every day, my husband would apply for jobs and the kids would play, and I would start typing, "How do you start a business on the internet?"
Because I knew that it was time to do something. And there was a time that summer where I remember we were laying in bed one night and I said, "Why don't you just let me sell my wedding ring?" And he said, "We can't sell your wedding ring. It will kill me. Just keep your wedding ring." And we held hands and we prayed that night and we said, "Lord, we have obviously not made good decisions. We need more adult supervision. Whatever it is you want to do with us in the future, just do it. We spent too much. We spent more than we should have, and we now we're in this shape. Just take over whatever you want our lives to be for the next season of life. We're yours." And before you knew it, he had a great job again and I was slowly figuring out, "Okay, what does entrepreneurship look like on the internet?"
Dr. Tim Clinton: So you took some inside drive, a little bit of passion, brought it together and started this business. Fascinating to me because as I looked into the story, I was like, "Wow, creative energy, a lot of prayer, and voila." Now you start this online business. Take us into that, and coaching, that's fascinating.
Alli Worthington: Well, I'll tell you, nothing's going to stop a mother when that mother is worried that her babies aren't going to be taken care of.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Oh yeah, you got five boys.
Alli Worthington: Yeah, you're going to work.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I grew up in a family of eight. I mean, I know what it means to come to dinner. You're not late to dinner because if you're late to dinner...
Alli Worthington: You don't eat. One of my favorite stories is one of my sons getting up in the middle of the dinner, excusing himself to go to the bathroom, but he brings a Ziploc bag to the table and puts a chicken breast in it, takes it to the bathroom with him, comes back, doesn't say a word. And my husband says, "What are you doing?" And he goes, "I didn't want anybody to eat my chicken."
Dr. Tim Clinton: I understand that. Seriously, if you grow up in a large family, you get it. Or if you grew up in just at a time when it was lean, you've been through lean years, you understand what we're talking about.
Alli Worthington: Absolutely.
Dr. Tim Clinton: But you go to work?
Alli Worthington: Yeah. So my first thought was, "I'm going to write a book." And so I googled, "How do you get a book deal?" And the answer was very depressing. It was, you're either famous, which I wasn't, infamous, which luckily I wasn't, or if you have a blog you can prove to a publisher you have something to say that people care about. So my next Google search was, "What's a blog?" So I started blogging and the blog turned into a conference for bloggers, which turned into a media company, and it just kept going and going and going. And what was really cool about that is I fell in love with the fact that for the first time in history, for everyone, but especially for women, we could go online and learn whatever we wanted to learn. We didn't have to get permission. All this information was free. And I developed the motto that with God and Google, you can build anything.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I love that. So stay at home mom here and now the founder of three businesses, and God began to really bless. How did you manage all that? How did you take care of five boys and a husband and the insanity of life and start to see this flourish? It had to be consuming too, because when you don't have anything and something starts working, you get obsessed with it.
Alli Worthington: Absolutely. For me, my business grew as my children grew. So I never separated home-life from work-life, it was all the same thing. So when the kids were napping or playing, that's when I worked. I worked early in the morning, when the baby was up in the middle of the night, I would nurse them with one arm and type with the other arm. But as more of the boys got into preschool and then school during the day, then it really ramped up. So by the time that youngest baby went to preschool, the business was booming because I had more time. As they grew, the business grew.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Let's make sure our listeners understand what kind of business you're talking about. What specifically were you doing? Okay, online business. What is that?
Alli Worthington: At this business, I was running a blog conference, so that would happen every year, but I shifted my focus into business coaching because I realized, "Oh, there's so much opportunity for women out there, whether it's a stay-home mom who wants to build her first business or an executive who wants to become an entrepreneur." I understood how things worked and the new media cycle, and I was able to coach women and give them the tools to be able to do it. It was so exciting.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Wow. Well, you're listening to Family Talk division of the James Dobson Family Institute, I'm Dr. Tim Clinton. Our special guest today is Alli Worthington, best-selling author, conference speaker, business coach, so much more. God's got His hand on her. She's a strong voice, for women especially, for such a time as this. Delightful conversation about what they went through, the journey they were on as a family from utter brokenness, bankruptcy, to God giving them a second wind. Alli, let's go a little bit further. I found it fascinating as God was blessing you somehow in the midst of all this, Mark, your husband quote, "you retire him." What does that mean?
Alli Worthington: Well, with the business, with speaking, people want you to come speak places on the weekends. And we realized with him having a full-time job and me with this company that I was building, we wanted to make sure the kids didn't fall through the cracks. And so his job had always involved turnarounds for companies. So every two or three years we would move. So before all of this happened, each of those boys was born in a different city or state. We had always been on the go with him climbing the ladder before his career. So when his job in 2012 was winding up, we had to decide are we going to move? Is he going to keep going or is his time going to be spent with the kids? And so amazingly, he said, "I think I'm ready to stay with the kids." So he took over coaching football and driving them to school every day and taking them to the dentist and all those sorts of things, and it worked out great.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Wow.
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Some would probably ask, I mean, what about the mom responsibilities and all this? They don't go away.
Alli Worthington: No, they don't go away at all.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Matter of fact, they probably get a little more challenging.
Alli Worthington: Well, I like to joke that he may be retired, but it doesn't mean that he's folding the laundry. We'll put it that way. He's a dad, stay-home, dad. He's not a stay-home mom. It's very different. Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I love that. Alli, you really shifted your focus into mentoring and coaching women in particular about finding their way in the business world. As you developed that Coach School and more, what did you begin to see and realize? No doubt, you saw a lot of weariness because let's go to single parent moms, for example.
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: They don't have somebody to help them out at home and they still need to put meat on the table, bread on the table, and they got to get connected or attuned with their kids because that bonding is everything. And I know this, that women who work outside the home, have kids in the home, they're doing probably 80, 90 hours a week. How did you start breathing life into all this?
Alli Worthington: Oh, yeah. It's a really tough situation. So many women like that have gone through the Coach School. That's my program where I train women to be coaches or to get more clients if they're already coaches. And the way I guide them is I say, "We are going to build this slowly on the side because you have enough responsibilities. There's enough on your plate. You're not going to quit your job. You need that income coming in, and you also need to spend time with your kids." And so the way we think about it is we just learn a little bit at a time, build a little bit at a time so they don't get burned out in the process. So when that income that they're earning on the side is enough to replace the main income, they can then step away from their main job and have that freedom to be with their kids and work on their own time schedule.
Dr. Tim Clinton: I found it fascinating that the title of, at least the early work that you were doing, was BlissDom or whatever. Is that, did I say it right?
Alli Worthington: BlissDom, yes.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Oh, BlissDom them. There you go. I love that. Blissfully domestic is really what you're saying.
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: And what's that mean?
Alli Worthington: Well, I think that there is this blissful sense of family life that we all love and it looks different. A blissful family life for one family, it looks completely different than another family. I joke that when the kids were little, what was blissful to us, other women would find gross. I really lowered my standards with housework, I'll tell you that because you don't have time to do everything. But that was blissful for us. So every woman going, "This is what I can do. This is what I have capacity to do in this season, and this is what makes me happy, and this is what I feel like the Lord's calling me to." That way we make our decisions and really live life intentionally without burning ourselves out.
Dr. Tim Clinton: No doubt. You have a lot of stories, maybe a couple that really stand out of some people you've encountered through the years or you've been able to "Step into their world and help them." Anything in particular you could share with us, things that might really resonate?
Alli Worthington: Absolutely. I was working with a woman a few years ago who had tragically, out of the blue, her husband had divorced her. There was an affair and he just stepped up and left. And she was left with two little girls and didn't know what she was going to do. She had some time, she had-
Dr. Tim Clinton: A lot of them, by the way, wind up living in poverty.
Alli Worthington: Absolutely.
Dr. Tim Clinton: People don't realize that and they don't like to often say it, but I'm going to put it on the air. A lot of these women wind up in those kinds of situations and it's horrific.
Alli Worthington: Absolutely. So what she did is she moved in with relatives, as women often do, and worked on figuring out, "What am I going to do?" Because she had never worked before. And so we were able to figure out where her skillset was and figure out what kind of service she could provide. And it turns out she was a natural graphic designer and she put those graphic design skills, she built those, put those to use, and built a graphic design business so she didn't have to go work outside of the home. She could run that business from home and support her family at a time when she thought all hope was lost.
Dr. Tim Clinton: That's so encouraging. Again, we're backstage at the Extraordinary Women Conference and there are over 5,000 women out in the Mabee Center here on the campus at Oral Roberts University. We found out through our research that probably 50% of those attending are single for whatever reason. And Dr. Dobson again had sent a note and said, "Tim, let them know that Shirley and I love them and appreciate them." In the midst of that, I was saying to myself, "Doc's always been a champion because he knows how important it is to speak life and to come alongside the family."
The family's under attack that, you know that? And we've got to figure out how to come into those moments, those dark places, and be there. And that's what the church is all about. The church needs to be stepping up into those moments. And what you're doing is you are helping give them life, wind, if you will. Again, often they wind up in poverty, they're ex is out gallivanting around with Susie, whoever it is, that doing the thing and probably doing pretty well, and she's home trying to figure out how to manage life with these kids. Trying to be a mom-dad, and she can't be a mom-dad, she needs to be a mom.
Alli Worthington: That's right.
Dr. Tim Clinton: But she needs to put bread on the table, right?
Alli Worthington: Yeah. No matter what, the bills keep coming unfortunately. And there's so many opportunities for women, like I said, with God and Google, you can build everything. And it's just endless resources out there once you know how to tap into them, where women don't have to feel like they're on their own, they don't have to feel like they have to be separated from their families if they don't want to be.
Dr. Tim Clinton: So in a lot of ways, I guess we could call you a mom coach.
Alli Worthington: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you absolutely. I'll take it.
Dr. Tim Clinton: You're a business coach, I get that, but what you really do is you specialize in speaking into that group that's inside these walls right now.
Alli Worthington: I do feel like it's my calling for the rest of my life to help give women tools that they need to be successful in whatever it is that God's called them to, whether it's parenting or business or life. I just want to come alongside them and give them what I wish I had 15 years ago.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Alli, if people want to know more about you and maybe they want to be a part of that network or what have you, where would they go?
Alli Worthington: Alliworthington.com or Ali Worthington on Instagram.
Dr. Tim Clinton: When someone goes up on your website, Alli, what can they expect?
Alli Worthington: One of my favorite things is I have a Find your Secret Superpower quiz. It takes about two minutes and it's going to tell you what your strengths are, what you could work on, what people appreciate about you, and the Bible verse for your style. I love that quiz.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Really?
Alli Worthington: Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Oh, so what superpower do you have?
Alli Worthington: For me, I'm a cheerleader. Makes sense.
Dr. Tim Clinton: Love that. Tomorrow on the broadcast, we're so honored that you would stay with us for my second program. We're going to talk about your new book coming out called Remaining You While Raising Them, the Secret Art of Confident Motherhood. I love that. It's a great title. Hey, give us a little sneak peek of some of what is really in your heart that resonates out of that book.
Alli Worthington: I'll tell you a shocking statement that I say that always makes women go, what? And here it is. "Great motherhood isn't about what you do, it's about who you are."
Dr. Tim Clinton: Well, all that and a bunch more tomorrow. I promise you it's going to be a fun day. What a delight. Ali Worthington, best-selling author, conference speaker, business coach, and so much more. Been a delight to have you on the broadcast today. On behalf of Dr. Dobson, his wife, Shirley, the entire Family Talk team, we thank you for being with us and sharing a part of your heart. Pray that God would continue to speak life and hope and encouragement into you as you shared that with others. Thank you so much for joining us.
Alli Worthington: Thanks for having me. It's been great.
Roger Marsh: Wow. Well, what an inspiring testimony from Ali Worthington today here on Family Talk. Moms really can work wonders with the power of God. As it says in Proverbs 31, verses 25 through 27, "She is clothed with strength and dignity. She can laugh at the days to come. She speaks with wisdom and faithful instruction is on her tongue. She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness." I'm Roger Marsh and you're listening to Family Talk. Now, if you missed any part of today's program, remember you can always go back and listen to it on our website at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. That's drjamesdobson.org/family talk, and be sure to join us again tomorrow as Alli Worthington returns for part two of our conversation with our own Dr. Tim Clinton on Remaining You While Raising Them. By the way, while you're on our website, be sure to take a listen to the new "Defending Faith, Family and Freedom" podcast with Gary Bauer.
Gary is our senior vice president of public policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute and he shares his unique perspective on current public policies through the lens of the U.S. Constitution and an unapologetic biblical worldview. Now, if you'd like to listen to the podcast, just visit our main homepage. That's drjamesdobson.org, and while you're there, select the image for the "Defending Faith, Family and Freedom" podcast. From there, you'll be directed to the podcast page and then you can choose your favorite listing platform and begin the episode of your choosing. We really hope you'll find it informative and encouraging. Another great way to listen to your favorite family talk programming on the go is through the latest version of the official app for the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Now, this newest version allows you to personalize the content you receive, making it easier to listen to or to share the latest family talk radio broadcasts, as well as hundreds of other archive shows as well. Create your own JDFI account to save all of your favorites and to set your preferences.
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