[0:00] Music.
[0:13] I have been discovering an analogy that is landing so squarely in my soul recently that I just wanted to share it with you and also will capture some lessons I've been learning behind the scenes that I want to sort of bring to the surface
[0:25] to show you what's going on for me behind the scenes of my business. I've been journaling and writing a lot about this analogy during my morning pages, and I'm excited to share some of my discoveries with you. And although this will probably be an analogy that sticks with me for a while that I'm going to keep developing and playing with, I want to just kind of share with you where it's at right now. So have you heard the phrase before, your energy is your currency?
[0:49] This phrase has always resonated with me since I first heard it, but I keep uncovering new levels of depth of understanding. So the first time I really learned the significance of this was when I first got fully booked with high ticket private coaching clients. And I dove in deep with my clients with my whole heart. and it felt like my energy was basically what I was training them for. They were investing financially in me and I was giving them my energy, my physical energy. When we were on calls, when we were chatting in Voxer, I was giving them my mental energy. When we were brainstorming and creating new ideas, I was giving them my emotional energy when they were going through hard things in their businesses or low points or growth moments. And I was there kind of being the grounding energy booing them up. That was the first time that I really learned that my energy was one of the big things they were investing in. And so my work outside of serving my private clients became taking care of my energy. I read lots of books to fuel my creativity and my thoughts. I did lots of my own deep work on my own thinking with my coach. I learned from programs that I was investing in and was working on just making my brain more valuable. And I think all of that is true. And I think it's important to realize that if you're a coach or a service provider, that people are paying you for your energy.
[2:12] They're investing in your energy, your heart, your thoughts, your skills, your gifts, your creativity, your genius, your experience. But recently I've been realizing more and more that same lesson, but on an even deeper level. And I've been learning to pay really close attention to and observe my energy
[2:32] levels and protect my energy levels to new lengths. A couple of months ago, I was at a networking event sitting next to my good friends and we were chatting and she just casually mentioned how, You know, when we talk about money as a currency because it's a current, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, whoa, how come I have never put that together before or heard that before?
[2:57] Currency, current. Money can quite literally be like a current. And this episode isn't going to talk about money specifically, but I do want to apply that same principle to the phrase, your energy is your currency. Or said another way, your energy is your current. So in other words, your energy is like a river that's flowing. And really recently, because I've been observing my energy like with a microscope, I'm discovering this analogy of the river is so perfect. So I'm going to pull out some similarities between physical rivers and our energy as women who run businesses to give you a physical, tangible example of what might be going on inside of your heart and mind that isn't visible or that might be harder to notice or detect or for someone to observe on the outside. And I want to talk about how to stay in the sweet spot of your flow, which I will elaborate more on very soon.
[4:01] So first, I want to make sure we're all on the same page because you're going to hear me say the word energy a lot in this episode, but there are a lot of different kinds of energy. And so I'll explain my own definitions for each. I think there's two main energies that I want to talk about today. And the first is physical energy, which is going to be super obvious. But the physical energy that I'm talking about is like the feeling in your body. It could be feeling excited and energized, or it could be feeling sluggish and tired and sleepy. I'm talking about like physical exertion. And this one's interesting because there usually isn't very much physical exertion required with our businesses. Most of what we do looks like getting on Zoom calls, pulling out our phone, getting on our computer and doing marketing. I think if you have retreats or in-person events or photo shoots, you will probably experience more physical exertion than other kinds of business owners. But also, we all have human bodies, and many of us are moms with kids at home, and a lot of us are moms with little kids at home, which can create new layers of physical demands. Lack of sleep.
[5:10] The energy required of getting kids packed up and in the car, driving kids around different events, cleaning the house, making dinner, cleaning up after dinner, trying to survive bedtime without falling asleep on the floor in your kid's bedroom like I do like three times a week. Anything that requires physically moving your body or having the energy to do so, I'm counting under this physical energy category.
[5:34] Next, I want to talk about this mental and emotional and creative energy. These three, I think can be harder to see visibly. And I'm honestly, I haven't quite decided where I think the line between mental energy and emotional energy and creative energy is. So I'm kind of just lumping them all into the same category. But for business owners, this is where a lot of our energy is required. It looks like serving your private clients. It looks like getting on calls. It looks like voxering with your clients. It might look like chatting with employees or contractors, having meetings, writing content for Instagram, for emails, for podcasts. Marketing can require a lot of mental and emotional energy. Launching is like the ultimate test of emotional and mental energy. Catching up on emails, responding to DMs, listening to podcasts, sending messages. I'm calling some of those ones out because I think those are ones that we don't often think about how they require our energy But they do.
[6:40] All of these things require at least some amount of our mental, emotional energy. And I'm sure you probably realize that, but I think that sometimes we don't give ourselves enough credit for even the small things because we think, oh, it shouldn't be that hard to just type up words and put it into a post or type some words into an email and send it or respond to this DM that I got. But the truth is that it does require sometimes a lot of mental and emotional energy. And I think that we should allocate more of our energy for those things, especially if you've ever gotten any kind of an emotionally charged email or DM. You can probably attest to how much emotional energy that required from you or possibly drained from you. And so I think even the small things that require some of our mental exertion
[7:33] are very, very worth paying attention to. So now that we've laid the groundwork for the difference between the physical and the mental slash emotional slash creative energy, let's go back to this river analogy. My hope is that listening to this episode just makes you way more in tune with where your energy in whichever category is going so that you can redirect and channel, you know, river words here.
[8:04] Channel your energy better so that it creates the results that you want, aka the money, the sales, the clients, all the things. So I'm going to talk about rivers in three different areas. First, I want to talk about that part of a river that I'm going to call the stagnant flow or the dead end, maybe. But basically that stagnant flow area in a river is the section where the water is either not moving or is moving very slowly or is moving in a spiral. And essentially, it's just creating a pool within the river's current. And it's usually caused by obstacles like rocks or large debris or sudden changes in the riverbed topography. I'm thinking of there's a river close to where I live called the Provo River, and it's super shallow all the way through, but it's really fun to just float down the river on an inner tube. And I'm thinking of times when I've done that with friends or family, and there's always parts of the river where the water moves slowly and sometimes doesn't move at all. It's completely stagnant. And if you get stuck in one of those areas because the river is so shallow and you're on an inner tube, you have to do this awkward bum shuffle to get your way out. It's where the mosquitoes live, which is the worst. It's where all the debris and the yuckiness kind of collects. And so that's what stagnant energy feels like.
[9:31] You might be experiencing stagnant energy flow if you often feel like you draw a blank when it comes to creating content, if you don't feel inspired very often with new ideas for things that you could sell or new offers that sound fun to create. You might be in a stagnant energy flow if you feel bored or even burned out of your business, or if you feel like you keep trying the same things over and over and they're just not working.
[9:59] So first there's lots of things that can cause stagnant flow of your energy in your business and in your life but first i don't want this to make you feel triggered like i'm saying that if things in your business aren't moving then it's your fault because you sting that's something i would never say i just want you to be able to see it for what it is and to be able to decide if you want to do anything about it but i think that probably the obstacles that are damning up the flow of your energy are probably things that make a lot of sense for whatever's going on in your life. Things like not having enough time to work on your business because you don't have a lot of support right now. And if you've listened to more than one episode of this podcast, you've probably heard what a huge advocate I am for getting support and paying for it if you need to and possibly paying a lot for it because the return on investment for things like this can be unlimited. But you might decide that you see this obstacle that you're in life where you're just in a phase right now Where it's okay with you if your flow is slower And I want you to feel empowered about making a choice.
[11:06] And choosing that intentionally instead of feeling guilty, like there's something better or something that you should be doing differently. But if you do want to change something and you want to get your energy flowing more quickly, here's where I would start. Well, first I would start with looking for getting more support. But also there's a couple other areas that I would observe or watch very closely. And maybe it will feel like putting yourself under a microscope a little bit to observe what's really going on in your heart and in your mind. Because if you are just kind of going through the motions in your life, you will probably miss it. So one that I want to talk about that I've caught myself doing is accidentally creating busy work for myself. So I think about like busy work in your business is work that like I've talked about how like in a river, sometimes there's like a dead end of a river, but there's probably work that you're spending on that has a limited earning potential.
[12:00] And I'm calling myself out on this because I've caught this recently for myself. I was spending some time managing the back end of my membership program, The Greenhouse, and I was like, oh, it's not that much time. But I realized that if you're like me and you only work 15 to 20 hours a week, every hour is precious. And even if managing the back end of The Greenhouse only took a couple of hours of my time per week, those hours have zero return on investment or a very small return on investment. Obviously, I hope the greenhouse grows over time and that's awesome. But as far as like taking the video recordings and uploading them to Kajabi, which takes for stinking ever, it takes time. And that work is not directly correlated with ways to grow my income.
[12:43] So I've hired a VA to help me do all of that. And obviously it's been a dream. But the difference between, let's just say like two to three hours per week, is the difference between more sleep for me. It's the difference between me working out or not. It's the difference between a few hours that I get to spend time reading or that I get to spend time creating an offer that I can sell and make thousands of dollars from. So like I said, sometimes work like this is basically an income dead end. And I think a lot of us spend a lot of time on these income dead ends without even realizing. And we kind of just tell ourselves that it's fine and it's not a problem. But when I have started to detect these income dead ends, what I'm doing is I'm getting someone who can help me with those things or, you know, either help me with it or do it for me, so that I can spend more of my precious 20 hours per week on projects that will help me make more money.
[13:44] There's another layer of this that I want to call out because I've watched myself do this, where I have accidentally created and sold offers that take a ton of time and work for me to fulfill. And because it takes so much time and yeah, I'm happy with the money that I made and with the offers that I've sold, but then my calendar gets full and then my brain starts to be like, I don't see how I could possibly add anything else into my calendar. And so as a result, my earning potential is instantly capped just because I don't have the bandwidth to create something new. So there was an offer that I sold a while ago that was like 150 bucks and I thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it ended up requiring me like three hours of work for each person who bought this offer.
[14:30] And there's two problems with that. One, I ended up doing work for way less than what my normal hourly rate would be, which whatever, that's fine. This is a good learning experience for me. so it's totally cool. But the second problem and the one that I'm way more concerned about for myself and conscious of for myself and for my clients now is what I was just saying, that that offer required me to do so much work for my clients that I didn't have time or creativity or mental bandwidth to create new offers as well. So not only was I not making as much as I wanted, but I also cut out any potential opportunities to make more money because I jam-packed my calendar worth work and it was less than my hourly rate. So if your calendar feels full of work right now, but you're not making as much money as you want, I would bet this is happening for you too. And basically this means that either we need to shift your offers to include less done for you work or less support or less deliverables, or we need to double your prices or triple or whatever. It's probably one of those things, but especially if you feel like you don't even have the bandwidth it to create something new, that's probably what's going on.
[15:42] I also want to talk about energy leaks here because I realized that every time I change tasks, I'm basically opening up a new tab in my brain. And basically every time I open up a new little tab in my brain, I'm opening a tiny little opportunity for a potential leak in my current of energy. And it might be so tiny that I might not even notice if I wasn't watching for it. And so for this reason, I started to set even stronger boundaries around when I check my phone, because even just chiming in and answering DMs requires an amount of energy.
[16:20] And if that feels like, if you're like, well, yeah, it does, but it's not that much. It's fine. That's what I'm talking about. That's an energy leak. If it requires any energy at all, and even if it's just a little bit, that's a leak. So I've been really checking with myself before I opened Instagram lately. And I asked myself, do I really want to do this right now? Or would that be an energy leak? If you're like me, I have lots of different platforms that I serve clients with. I have clients who I chat with in Voxer. I have women in the greenhouse and a Facebook group that I serve on a daily basis.
[16:55] And so there's lots of opportunities for me to be constantly checking. And so that's where I have to really set super strong boundaries and have a super strong awareness that I am going to serve women in those groups. This isn't going to change that at all, but I am going to be very intentional and picky about when and how and for how long and how frequently I do that. Also, before I tap on a podcast episode to listen to, I just know that's going to open up a tab in my brain that's going to make my brain go into work slash creative mode. And there are days in my week that I am in mom mode. And so it has been very useful for me to get really intentional about when I listen to podcast episodes too. Because if it's the beginning of a mom mode day and I go to the gym and I listen to a business podcast, it puts my brain in work mode. And it's totally fine, except for that that's not the result that I want to create right now. When I'm in mom mode, I want to be as close to fully in mom mode as I can. And I'm not perfect. I have not perfected this by any means. I don't want any of you to listen to this and think that I have mastered this because I'm still practicing. But I do think it's been very helpful for me to be super clear and honest and even saying something like, you know what, if I open up my Instagram DMs right now, I could get a DM from someone.
[18:22] That's you know asking me for something really significant maybe there's a potential client there or maybe there's someone who has something to say that you know might be harder for me to hear and so I just have to know and be super willing to know that when I'm opening my phone when I'm checking my Instagram DMs when I'm checking my email when I'm listening to a podcast I'm opening up a new tab in my brain and so it's been very useful for me to just make sure that I want to do that before I do it so that I don't just do
[18:51] it by default all day long. The next area of the river that I want to talk about is the rapids. So this will feel very relatable to you if you feel like right now in your business you are like getting tossed around. If you feel like you're drowning and you can barely come up for air, if you feel like every day is an all-out physical sprint, you might not even be keeping tabs on your mental or emotional energy right now because there's so much being required of you physically. You might be experiencing the rapids in your energy if you're slammed with client work, if you feel like clients or employees are knocking on your door figuratively constantly, if you feel like your job description is putting out fires.
[19:35] If you have a lot of work deadlines or client deadlines and you feel like you're constantly just sprinting to the next project deadline, and you might even be making a lot of money. But you might also be questioning whether it's worth it because you feel like you're a chicken with your head cut off a lot of the time so the thing that i want to show you here is that there's a risk to the rapids and the risk is actually very similar to the risk of the stagnant section of the river the problem is the same the problem is that you are at the creative helm of your business your creativity is the thing that makes you more money and if you don't have time to do your creative thing, then your income potential will most likely be capped. So again, this is not me trying to call you out for doing it wrong. I know if I sat down with you on a coaching call together and you explained to me the reason why you're feeling stuck in the rapids, it would make so much sense why this is happening. So I don't want this to let you throw you into shame. I just want you to have an increased awareness for yourself that even if the sails are flowing in the rapids, if your creative brain goes underwater, the earning potential of your business might be either slowed down or possibly capped. And also, you don't have to keep doing it this way if you don't want to. We can build in breathing room into your schedule and maybe literally.
[20:55] So like someone who's stuck in stagnation, support is the first place that I would look. What else do you need to get off your plate so that you can have more white space on your calendar. The next place that I would look would be, are there any sneaky doubts lingering under the surface that have you feeling like you can't make a move? Like, I don't have time to hire someone.
[21:17] I'm scared that the flow of clients is going to stop and so hiring someone feels too risky right now. Or I don't think anyone else could do it as well as me and so how can I hire someone? Or the person that I would want to hire seems like they might be hard or impossible to find, feels like it might be a little bit of a needle in a haystack situation and I don't have the bandwidth for that. Or this one's super sneaky. Someone else could actually do it better than me so I should just hire my replacement as the creative at the helm. Here's the thing. You are the golden goose of your business. Your creative energy is the lifeblood of your business. And I love helping my clients who feel like they're in the rapids especially work towards building protective walls around themselves so that there are layers of support fielding the fires and the phone calls so that you can be the mama goose who sits on her golden eggs and makes the business more money. The exact right person or maybe people that you need who can help you are out there. The more you believe that, the easier it will be for them to find you.
[22:27] Okay, so speaking of people finding you, let's talk about my favorite part of the river that I'm gonna call the sweet spot or the flow. Give me just one second to geek out about this. It's gonna seem like such a tangent. I promise it's very relevant to the story. So when I was in college, I went on a guided fly fishing trip with my dad. So random. I know. I think it was one of those things where my mom bought it for one of my brothers to go on this fly fishing trip with my dad, but they weren't able to. And so I got roped into going and it ended up being such a cool experience and so fun to do with my dad. And we'd talk about it all the time still, but it actually was fascinating.
[23:03] So this is what I learned about the river from this river guide. And it also happened to be on the Provo River, which I was talking about before too, which is fun. If you stand on a river, look at a river, you'll actually be able to see what I'm talking about. If you look close to the shoreline, a couple of feet out, you'll be able to see closer to the shore, the water moves a little bit slowly. But in the middle, the center of the river, the closer you get to the center of the river, the faster the water moves. And so there's this intersection between the slow moving water and the faster moving water. And it actually creates kind of like a physical line in the water that you can see where it intersects. There's probably a fancy word for it that I can't remember.
[23:42] But what I learned from this fly fishing guide is that if you look at that intersection between the slow and the fast moving water, right underneath that is where the fish hang out. Because they've learned that if they swim upstream all the time, they get really tired. But if they sit in the slow moving water, they can't find food to eat because the food comes through the fast moving parts of the river. So the fish will hang out right at that intersection spot in the river and they will actually turn upstream and float in the river and let the river bring food to them. And they just sit there with their mouths open and let the bugs float into their mouths, which is why fly fishing is a thing. Because when you have, you know, the little hook that looks like a fly, you cast it up the river and you try to put it right in that sweet spot in the river. And then it floats down and ideally, hopefully, basically lands right in a fish's mouth. And that's how you catch fish in a river.
[24:39] Cool, right? I could geek out about this for a long time because also he showed us how he showed us how you can he uses this tool to suck out the contents of the fish's stomach to see what it's been eating that day and based on the time of year and the time of day and the activity of the bugs in the local area that's how you choose which fly to use for your fishing pole random I know right but this is the fly fishing lesson that you didn't sign up for but that is so relevant to what we're talking about here because I love this analogy of us as business owners being like the fish that's turning upstream where we kind of hang out a little bit in the faster moving water, but also we hang out in a place where we can rest, where we don't have to work so dang hard and we can actually let nature or God bring opportunities to us without us having to try so hard. So here's what I found. The sweet spot for my river feels like, like I said, the intersection between rest and the intersection between work that I do, that is absolutely work, but that it feels so fun. So first, let's talk about the rest layer. I really like to put white space into my calendar.
[25:57] I will literally go into my Calendly and block out times where I don't take client calls and that time is scheduled for me to do creative work, whatever that looks like. I also like to spend time after I get home from the gym in the morning. I will just write on my laptop for a little bit. I'll do my morning pages. You heard about that in last week's episode, or if you didn't, go back and listen to the morning pages episode because that has been very useful and helpful for me to find my sweet spot in the river where the creative energy, the creative ideas are coming to me and flowing to me. And God is just putting them right at my fingertips. He just brings them right to me. And then my work just becomes acting on whatever revelation or inspiration he gives me that day.
[26:41] So like I said, building rest into my calendar with no guilt. When I put that white space on my calendar, I put it in with as much intention and seriousness as if it was a client call. Because I know that that time has the capability to bring me an idea that I could turn into an offer that would make me thousands of dollars, just like my private clients would, or whatever offer that I want to sell at the time. And so I take that blank space in my calendar very seriously. And I don't skip it. And it's become like a requirement for my sanity, actually. So then let's talk about this next layer, which is that I make sure that the work that I do have on my calendar is work that I love so much that it actually helps me feel more energized.
[27:33] Not always. Sometimes the work that I do, it is hard work. And I think that's a good thing. But I do like to kind of play with and experiment with different types of work that I do where some of it makes me feel drained afterwards and some of it makes me feel like it almost like makes me feel reinvigorated and I watch for any projects or things on my calendar that make me feel like my energy is drained afterwards or drained beforehand just knowing it's coming. You've probably heard people talk about like the Sunday scaries where on Sunday night you're just like filled with dread and miserableness because you know what's coming the next day. I think I would never be able to handle that. If I start to even feel a tiny sense of dread for what I have coming, that is very important information for me to listen to.
[28:22] And I think it's important for us to know that we have so many options as business owners. And like I said, I'm not saying that you shouldn't work hard in your business. I'm a huge advocate for working hard. I'm not one of those coaches who's like,
[28:34] just lean back and be chill all the time. And you're just going to have things flow to you all the time. I think the hard work is important for us, but I think we also have a lot more room to be more picky about the kind of work that we spend our time on than we think that we do. So if you've realized that you don't really like having a ton of private clients because private clients require a certain amount of energy and focus, then let's figure out a way to create a group that you can put in your calendar where you can still serve people in a really beautiful, intentional way, but that it's just different and it's fun and it's different from what you're doing on a daily basis that you work that you also love equally as much. Or if you've had a group before, but you realize that you love private client work way more, then let's figure out a way to get way more private client calls on your calendar.
[29:25] Or if you kind of like to have a combo, a mix of the two so that your work on a daily basis feels different every single day, that resonates for me. Let's figure out a way to find whichever offer you feel like you don't have as much as you would like right now, whether that's creating a group, whether that's creating a digital product that you can sell, whether that's creating a mini event that just goes for a limited amount of time, like a Voxer series or like a Voxer experience that's just a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a workshop series that goes for three or four weeks or, you know, just something to switch it up. Something new and fun for you to use your creative energy for that feels invigorating and inspiring and fun that when you, you know, you spend a lot of time and energy working on it and you feel just as energized afterwards as you did when you started. If you start to notice that the work that you're spending time on doesn't feel that way, it's time for a change and let's switch it up. And you have lots of options to play with. You're the golden goose girl. You get to be picky. So quick recap, the three areas of the river that I want you to watch out for in your physical or mental slash emotional slash creative energy. First, the stagnant flow.
[30:46] Second, the rapids. And thirdly, the goal, the ultimate goal is for you to find the sweet spot between the rapids and between the stagnant water where you put yourself in the right place at the right time so that God can bring opportunities to you so that he can put ideas in your brain that are going to light you up and light up your audience and make so much sense that the people who you market to are so excited to join. They feel no guilt or fear joining. They feel invigorated and so excited to work with you and so excited to pay you and invest in your genius.
[31:23] And after this episode, I want you to start paying very close attention to where your energy is going and identifying whether your energy is pointed in a direction that's going to create the results that you want or whether it's pointed to a dead end or pointed to the rapids. And I want you to start watching and being super observant and being very picky about what you participate in so that you can hang out in the sweet spot even more. And I would love to hear what you discover. So come back and send me an email or send me a DM on Instagram to tell me what you've realized or discovered about your energy and what you're shifting or tweaking in your business so that you can spend even more time in the sweet spot. I hope you guys have the best week and I will see you next time on the Wholehearted Business Podcast.
[32:11] Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, The Greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing, fruitful life while you build an amazing, fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at caitlynpriest.com slash greenhouse and I'll see you there.
[32:50] Music.
