The Practice of Finding your Power

In the book, I show you that your business is the territory of your soul’s expansion. I’m going to say that again, cause I know it’s woo for some people, but your business is the territory for your soul’s expansion.

Welcome to the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative, secretly sensitive and wildly ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christine Kane. Let’s do this.

Okay. Welcome everyone. This is episode number 30. Three zero, of the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Business Podcast. And I will just say off the record that I remember writing in my journal when I turned 30, and I was absolutely terrified. I can remember where I was in my apartment. I was terrified of being old. So funny. Anyway, this is the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Business Podcast and Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ is indeed a mouthful, especially for someone like me, who seems to have a bit of a lisp. And it’s the only way though, that I could figure out how to describe the kind of coaching that I do with people in their businesses. My book is titled The Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur for that very reason. And that book came out now about two months ago. And I want to thank each of you ’cause it hit number one on Amazon and in the category of women in business, as well as a few other categories, and it stayed there for several weeks and it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

I think you guys are sending it to friends and I love that. And I thank you for that. In fact, I just got an email from someone named Anette and Anette wrote and she said, “I don’t know if you will actually get this email.” I did. Thank you, Annette. And I do, I do read my emails, “but after purchasing your book and attending click 2020, I purchased seven more of your books and sent them to women, entrepreneurs, and friends that I know one in Germany, one in Canada, and then a couple in various States, I am new to the entrepreneur world and excited to see what happens. Thanks so much.” Thank you right back Annete. That’s very, very cool to read. I really appreciate it.

And what’s very funny to me is that I was told by one of the publishers that my agent pitched my book too, that my reader did not exist. And you know what, perhaps they don’t in a way that would make publishers excited, like in an Oprah, Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift make book companies drool kind of way, but we do indeed exist. And I keep hearing from you guys and you’ve left some really beautiful reviews on Amazon about the book and on Audible and all of this is to say yet again, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for getting the book and thank you for reading it and buying it for friends. It really does mean a lot.

Today we are going to talk about a specific and what I think of as crucial way to discover this thing that we call power, or we could call it clarity or even energy in your business. And I’m going to share a deleted section from my book. It is a metaphor that totally bombed, but I’m going to bring it back to life here. And this just goes to show how much you can write and write and write and write and still fall flat. But I’m going to use this little section to teach you about something that has had transformational impact for me and also for hundreds of my clients. And it’s how to find your business power and clarity through using the challenges that come up in your business. Like you’re using challenges as kind of these little power finders like, like little power decoder rings, challenges, and hard stuff. They can be like, wonder twins, power activate form of iceberg. If I may be so very stupid.

So first I will start with the deleted section of my book. And this is about how I learned to do my very first pull-up, which ultimately became being able to do 10 pull-ups, which I know is a big deal, especially for women. And I will admit, admit right now I cannot do anymore. I actually keep myself at five pull-ups now because when I could do 10 pull-ups, my neck and shoulders started to make me look like Dick Butkus or something. And I just didn’t want to look like a linebacker, but I appreciate women who love muscle, I just didn’t love that much muscle in me. So anyway, here we go. And by the way, this was originally in the section about managing your power as an entrepreneur. So there is a little bit of an assumption that I’m making here that you already know what I mean by power, but I’ll shut up now and start reading from that section of the book.

The first time I tried to do a pull-up, I hung there like laundry. If you were watching you might’ve thought I wasn’t moving, or maybe you’d have seen a slight spasm in my back as I tried to make something, anything, do something, anything. The problem was I couldn’t even find the muscles in my back. I couldn’t access whatever brain functions were required to move those muscles. Working with your own power is similar. If you’ve never consciously or consistently accessed this thing I’m calling power, it may feel impossible to you right now that you can manage it, let alone retrieve it when it takes off in kind of a pressure cooker response to an old pattern. Even if you now understand intellectually that you determine where your power goes, you might not be able to find it or feel it in order to direct it or call it back quite yet. And this is actually pretty normal.

The practice of managing your power or mindset or energy usually shows up in one of two ways. The first is the proactive and the second is the reactive. So the proactive is what we all like to think of when we manage our power, it would be similar to wanting to do that first pull up and standing under the bar and saying, I’m now going to do a pull-up and in your imagination, that’s how it should happen until it doesn’t. It’s the same thing with anything strategic or proactive in your business. I’m now going to choose who exactly my ideal client is, or I’m now going to only think abundant thoughts or I’m only ever going to charge a minimum of $2,500 for my services. In our imaginary ideal world, and frankly, in most self-help books, power is something we command, and wallah, our new outcome materializes. And here’s the sticky wicket. The idea is so compelling. Like, Hey, you got your affirmations, think positive now, or Hey, is that your goal clearly now go implement and make it happen.

But the reality, as we all know, is that the proactive model doesn’t always work. In fact, for many of us, it doesn’t ever work, not on its own, at least. For those who haven’t found their muscles yet. And in this case, it would be your clarity muscles or your power muscles. Those who don’t even know their own patterns or triggers yet all of this proactive creative stuff remains simply a nice idea, but you’re still just standing there under that bar staring at it. And so this is why I like to celebrate when something seems to go wrong or backward or get wonky in a business, because that is teaching you. And that’s the flip side of the proactive. It’s the reactive. And even though reactive gets a bad name in business, you can’t ignore the role It plays in your business expansion.

Even if you’ve become masterful at the proactive stuff, you’re still going to get blindsided, sometimes. Like out of nowhere, you’re going to be triggered and have no clue what happened. All you know is that it’s 2:00 AM and your barefoot in your kitchen next to an empty cheesecake factory box wearing only a nightshirt, clutching a fork. And yes, I do know that part made it into my books. I remember moving it. All of this leads many of us, especially those who are more emotionally wound up or sensitive types, to say things like I’m just not cut out for this business shit. They’re triggered. Their affirmation didn’t work. They caved. They got a bunch of non-ideal clients. A launch didn’t go well in spite of their positivity. And they were caught unaware and so they collapsed into an unconscious relationship with their power or their pattern and they hang their like laundry.

So back to the pull-up thing. Consider how I ultimately did learn how to do a pull-up. I got a stool and I stood on it. I hoisted myself up to the top position of the bar as if I had already pulled myself up. And then I would slowly lower my body down. I did this movement over and over and over for months. And that’s because that movement helped me find and feel those muscles I couldn’t feel. A year or so later, I could do a series of pull-ups, and eventually, yes, I did 10 pull-ups. So here’s a little bit of exercise trivia. This lowering phase of an exercise that I just described, is called the eccentric phase, not eccentric as in how delightfully, whimsical and weird you are, but eccentric, as in a backdoor movement of the muscle. This backdoor movement can also apply to creating new responses and more power in your business choices. It’s how you can learn to access your power when you can’t plan for the unknown, or in those instances when you’re feeling reactive or caught. In other words, we can take an alternate route to reconnecting with our power. Also, you can use the eccentric approach to build your power muscle when you think you’re not strong enough to manage the full motion. Even if you didn’t expect some challenge or seemingly negative circumstance, you can still leverage a situation that lands you in a reactive place and yes, find your power in it.

Okay. I’ve stopped reading now. So in the book, I teach something I call the power retrieval process and I’m not going to go into every step of that right now. All I want you to understand here is that more often than not, we learn about our own clarity or power or energy or strategy by first experiencing the eccentric motion, the reactive, or even the stuff that doesn’t work. And I’m betting that now you can see why this section didn’t make it into my book because the metaphor kind of falls flat here, I think, but I really wanted to share that because I think somewhere, you can get a sense of it.

So if any of you were on the special Zoom session that I did before the first week of the new year, I shared several segments of a tool that I typically share with my clients at the end of each year. And that tool is called the plan. And on that Zoom, we did the first part of the plan. And what we did, was that we spent some time reviewing what’s working right now in your business, and most importantly, what isn’t working right now, in your business. The stuff that doesn’t work, that doesn’t go well, that triggers you or lands badly, that’s your biggest teacher in your business If you let it be, and this is why I always include this in the work I do with clients. It’s also why, by the way, after every experience in your business, no matter what business model you’re in, but whatever your experiences are, whether that would be a sales call or an online workshop that you just did, or an employees first month, or a house you just sold, or even after each business week, this is why it’s so important to do kind of a quick review and create a list, even if it’s small, of what worked and what didn’t, so that you can then use that list to see how and where you might get stronger in your clarity and power, or even in your strategy to set up different action steps based on what you’re seeing.

What I’ve discovered, is that if you don’t do some kind of practice like this, your business becomes nothing more than an ongoing sequence of events and experiences and circumstances and situations that may or may not throw you off balance or trigger you, and you just keep on plowing through, fighting it all, trudging forward until you just burn the fuck out. And that’s how many people do business their whole entire lives. They clamp on their Wonder Woman bracelets and hope they can deflect the bad stuff and just brace themselves to make it through. But in the book, I redefine what power is, and it is not the use of force or dodging bullets or avoidance, or even hustling harder. In the book, I show you that your business is the territory of your soul’s expansion. I’m going to say that again, cause I know it’s woo for some people, but your business is the territory for your soul’s expansion and even your strategy’s expansion.

And you learn that through the eccentric stuff, through the stuff that doesn’t work. And I know, this takes a level of commitment and practice that quite frankly, most people will not consider and don’t even want to consider. I totally get that, but I’m going to make it simple here, because you can make this a practice. Like we can do the eccentric motion thing and power and clarity can become a practice that builds up that, that awareness that you have, the capability that you have, and the muscle. So when you first start opening up to this, though, I will warm you, It might seem a little bit overwhelming, especially if you’ve never set any standards or boundaries or gotten clear on anything. If you’ve just sort of run your business, like just by accident, this is going to seem like what’s not working everything for everyone. They all suck.

So it could be anything from the landlord who charged you way too much for your office rent and you agreed because at the time you signed the contract, you were clueless, or maybe it’s an assistant who isn’t doing their job well, and you don’t know what to do because the thought of finding someone else is overwhelming or a client who calls you all hours of the days and night and expect instant responses. But the key here, is that when you engage in a consistent and regular practice of asking yourself what’s working and what’s not working, that practice, that looking at that eccentric motion, as you experienced this muscle you haven’t ever used, you’ll probably find where you need to start building up muscle. And this is how power and clarity and strategy and expertise get created in your business. Especially if you feel like you are too sensitive.

And the problem for people who feel like they’re too sensitive is that often when something goes wrong in a business, many people collapse onto that problem. And then they interpret it to mean that either someone is bad or they are flawed, or someone is annoying or terrible or whatever, and that just doesn’t serve you in your business growth. As Maya Angelou once said, “when you know better, you do better”, but you can’t consciously know better until you want to know better and do better as opposed to just being reactionary and crumbling every time stuff goes wrong.

So let’s close here with an example of how you might start finding this eccentric practice, in something that doesn’t work and how you can then use it to Uplevel your business in your clarity and your muscle and your power and all that stuff. One of my clients, I will call her Vanessa, is a high-level website designer, and I will say this by the way, this might be Vanessa’s story, but it’s also the story of many of my clients in similar businesses.

So she is a high-level website designer and branding consultant. Now Vanessa has been working with me for a while. So she had already up-leveled her marketing and messaging, once she realized that her ideal client was a company who… companies, who had the money to be able to work with her in depth for extended periods of time on their branding and websites. So that was her first ecentric movement. And that took time, all right, but then another thing wasn’t working, and this was completely unexpected. Vanessa’s high paying clients with their big budgets, It seems like, Oh, this is all going to be perfect now. What would happen was they would show up at their first website or branding meetings they’d be fired up totally gung ho all kinds of great conversations, all kinds of information being shared, promises being made, excitement exchanged. And then after that, after a few back and forth emails, Vanessa would send them the list of all the things that she needed based on what they talked about in the meeting so that she and her team could begin their work, and then things would unravel. The client more often than not would do some sort of vanishing act. Now they’d already paid. So that wasn’t a payment issue. They would just take forever and a lot of badgering to do the work that she needed them to do to get the results they said they wanted.

And what would happen was they’d write an occasional apologetic email, they’d promise all kinds of delivery dates, and then it wouldn’t happen. And what happened for Vanessa and her business is that this would create a backlog for her and her team. It would create a lot of stress for Vanessa and I will go ahead and share, and Vanessa knows this, I don’t think she’ll mind, even though I changed her name, but she has a bit of a short fuse. And if you were at the Enneagram and The Entrepreneur event that I did, the virtual event I did last week, we looked deeply at these patterns that we each have. And some of us get impatient. Some of us go to shame. Some of us go to fear. Your pattern is something really worth being aware of. So you can observe rather than just go batshit crazy.

And Vanessa’s pattern was getting irritated and judging her clients for being totally incompetent and chaotic. And like many of us would do in the face of our own triggers and uncomfortable emotions, Vanessa told herself to stop being so judgy and just let the clients take their time. And by the time she presented this issue to me, she was kind of losing her marbles. She just wanted to start firing clients. She thought she had done her ideal client profile wrong, but that’s when I coached her to use this eccentric motion again, like I just had to, we had to mine a little deeper until I stepped in and we started mining for this, the best solution she could think of as the leader of her company, was just kind of like, fire people or make it all about them being wrong. So we dove in, we looked at what’s not working.

And you know what I’m going to do right now? I’m looking at the time of this and we’re already at 22 minutes, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to make this a cliffhanger. And you know what, if I had some really cool music to play in the background, I totally would do that right now. So I’m going to leave you with this story. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to share what happened and what we did in the next episode, which will be episode number 31. And here’s what I want you to do this week. All right, this week, I want you to observe your life and your business and see if you can catch the things that aren’t working or the things that trigger you or even blindside you. And if something really does blindside, you, you can go revisit the section in the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur, my book on managing your power, and find the power retrieval process, because it’s a really great thing you can do.

It’s a technique that I’ve used for years and years and years, not just with me, but with my clients. And then what I’m going to do on the next episode, is I’m going to show you how we used this practice to build Vanessa’s power, both on the Strategy Track and the Soul Track in her business, and you’re also going to learn some other insights about working with clients that will help you set up your client systems and teach your clients how to treat you from a place of power, as opposed to a place of force, which is what most of us think of as power.

Sound good? I hope so. Cause I just decided that in the moment. So thank you for being here today and for listening. And if you know someone who would benefit from this episode in their business and wants to stick with us through the cliffhanger, share the love or pass it on or better yet send them a copy of my book for Valentine’s day or something. But in the meantime, thank you guys for listening to the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Business Podcast, and we will continue this conversation on power and strategy and clarity and energy and eccentric, motion and movement next week. Thanks. Y’all.