Well, hi, welcome to the podcast. Let's talk about healthy success this week. Let's get started.

Hi, everyone.,this is Kris Plachy. Welcome to the Leadership is Feminine podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. Welcome. Welcome. If it's your first time, I'm happy you've joined us. And if you've been coming here for a while, welcome back. Hello. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. How are you? So I want to talk to you about a couple of things.

First of all, some housekeeping. We have just reopened Lead for Women for registration and we're doing something kind of different that we've never done before. We're doing offering a six day free trial. What that means is you'll get the very first module. It has four video lessons plus the PDFs. Plus you'll have an opportunity to experience coaching and it's six days. You have all of that complimentary.

And then on the seventh day, the trial ends and you would begin making weekly installments over the course of the 12 weeks. It's just $232 a week. And it's a 12 week program. You can cancel anytime, but if you finish the program, you get to keep all of the content. It's super cool, but we wanted to give you a little peek inside.

I think a lot of people prefer that. I understand that. And I really want you to have an opportunity, if you haven't worked with us yet, to kind of wrap your head around it and get some exposure to what the experience would be like. So head on over to thevisionary.com/lead and you can learn all the details. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how easy it is and how you can get started right away. So super excited about that.

So let's talk about healthy success. This is one of those interesting topics that came up very organically. I'm going to give you some backstory, and then I want to just give you some questions to kind of think about.

So, I had just completed my Hawaii retreat a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking to my coach, Natalie, who I know you all have heard me talk about many, many times. She's amazing. She's really more my spiritual advisor. We were talking about how I've noticed after these last few times that I've done my Hawaii retreats, that when I'm finished, I don't feel like this really big accomplishment has been achieved.

And I know that I've talked to other people about some similar experiences. Like when you do a big speaking event after you've done them a lot, or you just done big groups or you've once you've done things over and over a few times, you finish and you feel like you should feel like ecstatic or super proud or happy or- and it's a phenomena, it's actually phenomenon - can I just say that right? - it's actually, very common.

And so I was talking to her about that for me, and I said, "You know, I've been doing Hawaii retreats for 11, 12 years now, and I love doing them, and I love being in them, and I love working with my clients when I'm doing it. It's just that I notice, like, it's just part of what I do now. I don't have that same experience that I think I used to have when I was doing them myself." And I think part of that is when I started the retreat, I really built that retreat concept and what I offer, out of my own need. And now I can just hold all this open space for my clients when they come.

And so she asked me some questions. She said one question, she said, "Well, where do you get your happiness from?"

And I said, "Oh, um. My husband, talking to him. Talking to my kids. Getting into bed at night when I'm just tired. My first sip of coffee in the morning. My dog. My little babes."

And I started laughing at myself and she was so funny cause she started laughing and she's like, "So that all sounds really great, like, kind of healthy. Like, you're not using your work for your joy to make you happy."

And I thought, Oh, that's so fascinating. Cause that's kind of what I do with my Sage clients.

Because my Sage clients have built these successful businesses and the relationship that we have with our business over time changes. And then we hit these sort of places in our lives where we're like, okay, so... We don't get the same kind of hit out of our business.

So then a few days later, one of my Sage clients, I had asked them a question about what feels like magic right now in your life. And she replied and she said, "You know, I've been thinking about this for a few days. And what feels like magic is just being with my kids and buying mums for fall and enjoying my life and it doesn't have anything to do with my business."

And she said, "I feel almost a little bit of shame saying that."

And so I, through the back and forth that we all had on this Voxer conversation, that's when I said I think this is a conversation that we need to have because I don't know that we talk about healthy success. I think that we talk about success and how to get it. And I think that there is a lot of muck that women have to move through to claim and feel successful, without the trappings of feeling selfish, feeling braggish, feeling arrogant, feeling isolated, all the things that come with that.

So because of that, because there's all this potential for us to heal things through achieving success, success can always feel quite big. Like there's a lot to do in it. So it's very distracting. But my goal with the women I work with and myself is that like, isn't that all of our goal, is to get to the point where we have achieved a level of success that our business is doing well, we have lovely lives that we live, and there kind of isn't drama and that we can just savor, we can just savor a moment?

We don't define our emotional health by what's happening in our company or on our team. We live independent of that. Sure, we care about our business. We enjoy the work we do. We have days that are great, some days that aren't, but we don't feel those swings anymore. Right? So why is neutrality boring? And, is ultimately the achievement of success that you say you want, is it ultimately kind of boring and simple? And is that the point? And is that why people keep burning things down and starting them over again, right? Because it's not stimulating anymore.

So I need to get the get. But I'm arguing and contending that the get that we seek, the thing that we're trying to create in our lives, doesn't have to come from your business. And I've said this for years, right? Don't use your business to tend to your emotions. Don't use your business to define whether you're a competent, capable person. Let's do that independent of that. And the first step for so many of my clients is actually separating from the business. Like, you know, sort of from an energetic perspective. There's me and then there's the business.

But what is it that you derive happiness from? What does feel like magic to you right now? Do you find joy in the simpleness of your life, in all the work you've already done to be where you are? Is that enough? Could it be? Would you like it to be? And what do you make that mean if you just savor? If you don't use your business for a hit and you don't feel guilty that your business doesn't give you a hit, that we just claim that healthy success might actually feel quite restful, calm, dare I say boring.

You know, I watch women do it to women. This isn't even a male/female thing. This is just, even other women don't hold space for other women to relish the simplicity of their success because of judgment. So, for sure, could we stop doing that to each other? Like, if she's enjoying working in her garden and potting mums, like, let her love that. Why we gotta bring up, like, what's happening in your company?" Uh, must be nice, you have people running your business for you."

Like, what are we gonna do that for? We wouldn't do that to a dude. But we have to give it to ourselves first before we can give it away. Do you know what healthy success feels like for you? Because I can anticipate this will land differently for a lot of people. Some of you might think, Ooh, this is interesting. Some of you might think that sounds like you're just another excuse for like taking your foot off the pedal. Maybe.

I don't think so. I think you can work hard. I think you can have focus. I think you can have a vision. I think you can have a clarity of vision. I think you can have goals. I think your team can have goals. I just don't think you need to get your emotional hit, your joy exclusively from that.

I think a lot of other people think I'm never going to get there. I don't know how to feel successful without it this exertion and kind of tug of war relationship with my business. But I work with enough women to know that that's not true. I do know it's totally achievable. It's a relationship. It's not a point on a map and it's not a number on an Excel spreadsheet. It's you, realizing that success doesn't have to come at such a price. And it also doesn't have to be so powerful that you're like, jonesing for the get, if you don't have it.

I think there's lots of different ways to define success. And I'm not here to tell you what the right one is, but I will tell you that for me, ease, joy, relishing and savoring, and the time to do that is success for me and remembering why I live. I did not get born and put here to work and create work for myself and others. I got put here, I believe, to experience the human experience. And I want to experience all of it and understand all of it.

I was thinking the other day, jokingly, because I've never been like an athlete on a team and I was a cheerleader, but don't hold that against me. And no offense to the cheerleaders. You know what I'm saying? I was a captain and everything. But I think my chosen sport is self reflection. I think I do that as like an athlete would go to the gym. I'm just so driven really to explore ideas and apply them and wrap them around myself and other people. I just love doing that. And so that is the part of what I do that I just, I do still love so much.

But I feel my own joy now and I don't look to my clients to give me joy. And I would ask you to really think about that, like, how you separate those things, you conjure your own emotional experience. And the better you get at having a relationship with that and understanding that, I believe the more present you are in every part of your life and the cleaner and healthier success becomes for you.

So I hope that resonates and makes sense for you. Something to think about today. And if you aren't a client yet, and you'd like to join us for powerful conversations, join Lead. This is a great time to do it. The free trial will be open just for, I think we said to like the 17th of October. So a little ways to go and then it will close down.

So I'd love for you to give it a shot.

Okay, love. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.

Lead for Women is now open for registration. If you're a woman and you are also a visionary, somebody who sees the world differently than it is, and you are eager to achieve that through your work and by leveraging the hearts and minds of others, then I invite you to go to thevisionary.CEO/lead and learn everything you can about our Lead program.

While it's not for everyone, it really is for you if you are a woman who is ready to learn how to think better, so you can lead better, and you can live better. You have a legacy to leave here and I wanna help you leave it by enhancing and improving how you show up as a woman who leads. Join us there.