Build a Business that Supports Your Life

Kris Plachy: Well, hello, beautiful CEO, welcome! Let’s talk about you and your tender heart and your beautifulness and the season that we’re in. Let’s do it!

Well, hi, welcome to Leadership is Feminine, I am Kris Plachy and I’m honored that you’re here with my voice in your ear today. I’m sort of rhymey, aren’t I, today? So, I was just talking with my colleague and BFF here at work, Michelle Aaron, and we were talking about the podcast, and I was out, I’ve been out for quite a bit this month.

And I said to her, “What’s going on? What do we need to talk about? What’s happening in the ethers?” So, we were talking about—she brought up that there’s a lot of folks who are in our lab program, especially in the last few weeks, who’ve been having a hard time. I would say that that’s not uncommon and not something unusual. I’m hearing that in a lot of different places and spaces.

I just talked to my coach this morning and asked her “What’s happening? What’s happening in the world?” It’s a weird time, everything feels weird. And as I’m recording this, it’s in the afternoon and its even weird outside, like it’s a funky gray and… I don’t know, It’s just odd. So, I wanted to talk with you about the relationship between building a business and building a life, and maybe we need to switch that order, building a life while running a business.

So, several months ago, I sort of had this realization that I’ve been in business for 10 years, I’ve had my company for 10 years, I have been so honored to have a business for 10 years. This is a gift that is denied to many, right? Or people get—they quit before they get there.

And so, I remember when I first started, there were all the stats about how many people make it past first year, how many people make it past the third year, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t pay much attention to that, I also didn’t pay much attention to the fact that people would say, “Oh, life coaches, they only make $30,000 a year.” I’m like, well, we haven’t met.

But nonetheless, 10-years, that’s a long time, and I have worked with thousands of people. For as different as we all feel in many ways right now, I can assure you, we’re not that different: male, female, young, old, experienced, inexperienced, successful, not successful. There are some real basic truths that I think we all share, and the more we tune into that and tell ourselves the truth about that, the better everybody’s going to be for it.

Specifically, here in the entrepreneurial space, you know, for those of us who—it doesn’t matter what space you’re in as an entrepreneur, you have a space, right? So, I tend to be in sort of this coaching online space, other people are kind of in that influencer, other people are in accounting, and other people are lawyers, and other people are dentists, right? We all have kind of a place that you park. And then within that place, there’s lots of noise, lots of “You shoulds.”

“Oh, you know what you should do? Oh, you know what you should do? Oh, I was thinking about, you know what you should do, right?” Like there’s lots of “You shoulds” everywhere. And most of my clients drop into and resonate with being an empath. And being an empath means, it’s like, you absorb a lot of energy from people, and it literally is noisy, right? I’ve mentioned this before that there’s this really cute show on Netflix about fairies. And one of the fairies superpower—whatever you call it, magic, is that she’s an empath.

And so she has to walk around with noise canceling headphones on because she just is constantly absorbing all the noise. And I have certainly gone through phases in my life where it just gets too loud. There’s a really good song by an artist called Jessie. And it is a song that she sing, it’s called Loud, and it’s absolutely powerful.

So, if you tend to be like what I’m describing, where all of a sudden, you hit these moments where the world is loud, just go get in your car, download that song from Jessie. Jessie J, I think is her name, it’s called, Loud. And just put it on as loud as you can, it’s an incredibly powerful song. I find a lot of power and healing in music.

So, I wanted to talk with you, about what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs, is you have a vision, you have ideas about what you want to create in the world and you want the…The very notion of you being an entrepreneur, means you’re already somebody who wants to be successful, I really do believe that.

I do believe there’s a lot of people who give up on themselves, but I do believe that every person who hangs out a shingle and says, “I’m going to do this thing in the world,” they do not do that and want to fail, they do that and want to be successful. It’s just that for some people, there’s different needs, different challenges that come along the way. So, if we can just agree that everybody who hangs out a shingle does want to thrive, does want to be successful.

But where we anchor wisdom has an impact on not just our ability to achieve success, but the speed in which we do. And in my observation, people who anchor wisdom—not intelligence, not intellectual knowing, but wisdom. People who anchor their wisdom internally move faster and achieve more. People who anchor their wisdom external get confused, it slows them down because we get filled with the “You shoulds.”

And I would say, that I’ve experienced both in my life as a business woman, where I was clear as day, my wisdom was accurate, I went all in—paid off. Other times, can’t find it. Where did the wisdom go, did it take a vacation? Didn’t want to take me. And then, I’m lost because what do I do? And what do we all do when we can’t access our own wisdom? We go knocking on the door of everybody else. “Do you have it? Do you have it? What about you? Maybe you have it. You look good.”

You’ve heard me talk about how we all get these kits, right? When we’re born, and each of us have our own kit, we just don’t get a picture on the outside of the box, so we don’t know what the kit—what it looks like when we’re done. And so, because we don’t know what it’s going to look like when we’re done, we walk around to everybody else’s kit and we ask, “Oh, can I do what you’re doing? Because your kit looks good,” even though we may not have the same supplies inside our kit to achieve the same result.

And as we get more mature in our business ownership and more mature in our lives, what I am also encountering and experiencing with so many of my clients is that that reactionary life pulse that we’ve had for the majority of the first half of our lives, right? Like most people, it’s, find a partner, get married, make babies, start a business, get a job, make money, get kids through school, sign permission slips, buy sneakers, get more water bottles, because they’re all gone, buy copper tone, right? Like you’re just—you are in this period of life that you are in reaction. Even though you are making plans, you’re still in such reaction to everything that’s going on around you. And when you also have a business, it’s the same.

And so, so many of my clients who I’ve worked with for a while, who have achieved multimillion dollar businesses, they hit this place in their life where they’re like, “Wait a minute. I’m not reacting anymore, what do I do? Who am I?” And these bigger questions come up and this isn’t just for women whose kids have left the house or never had kids, or… you know, this is also for women who have young kids, but there’s been a significant change in their life.

Big transformations are happening to people everywhere, there’s a collective sort of waking up in many cases for a lot of women. Listen, if you haven’t been woken up in the last few months, you better start waking up. We have to create the lives we want, no more waiting and no more believing that other people will do it for you.

And as exciting as that is, it’s also quite terrifying. And so, for so many women who start a business—and you guys have heard me say this before, a lot of women, I believe, start businesses because they’re trying to heal some sort of wound that they’ve experienced in their lifetime, right? Establishing value, establishing worthiness, establishing freedom, independence, right? All of that’s great. I don’t think that’s bad, it’s just, let’s tell the truth about it, that’s what a lot of women are doing, and it’s great news because all these women are making money, but we get so immersed in the business that we end up building a life around the business.

We’ve accommodated the business by compromising our lives. And I think a lot of people…I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know. At least like my former client, Chaney, right? She talks about astrological weather. “We might be having some weather, we’ve got some numbers going on…” Listened to me, I believe all of it, but what I do know, regardless of the—why is energetically—something’s happening for people and we’re feeling it, and there’s a lot of sensitivity. And instead of just saying, “Wait a minute, I have a truth that I’m going to find.” People are also programmed to believe that it’s outside of us, and we’re starting to realize nobody knows.

I know for myself, this whole pandemic experience was really enlightening because I’m 52, but I still always thought adults would show up and be smarter than me. And I think we realize nobody really knows, that security that there’s someone who’s smarter and, I don’t know, I’m not to say that there aren’t people that are smarter than me, don’t misunderstand that, right? There was just so much confusion, it’s been so interesting to really live through a time of such ambiguity. But the blessing of that is that everything is ambiguous, which means we get to pick what we want to believe.

And so, I was actually talking to my dear girlfriend, Brooke, right? We just celebrated her birthday, she’s beautiful, she had this incredible celebration. She invited several of us to Telluride, it was absolutely an epic journey experience, I’ve never encountered anything like it, it was such a gift to all of us. But we talked. She and I have been talking about this and I’ve been talking about this with my coach after I hit my 10 years to bring it back to that. I said, “You know, I spent 10 years building a business and living, and what I want to do now is, I really want to think about—I’m 52, what is the life I want to live for my back nine,” as one of my coaches used to say. And then, what is the business that supports that? Not, “What kind of business am I going to build? What do I want to do? How do I want to build it?” There has to be an alignment and my life goes on top.

And I think wherever you are in your business trajectory, you can make this decision. I do not think this is the gift of someone who has a successful business, who has a lot of money, I actually think it’s the opposite, I think a lot of people who achieve tremendous success and wealth, get trapped in businesses they hate because they didn’t ask this question. And then they try and unpack a life that is so webbed up in a business. So, if you’re living a life right now, that is precluding you in some way from investing as much as you want in your business. Let’s talk about that.

Maybe you do have young kids, maybe you have an unhealthy partner, someone that you’re taking care of, maybe you are lacking resources, whatever the reason, you are not in a position to give the business the energy and attention that you wish that you could. Instead of staying in that position with your business, that you are inadequately supporting it, how about we invert that question, we invert that relationship, and we say, “I am so grateful that I have a business that exists, while my life needs to be lived.”

Years ago, we went through some challenges with things going on in my family, and I had some illnesses, we had a lot of things just many years ago. The emotion that I have every time I think about that time in my life is gratitude, because I had this beautiful business that was able to ebb and flow with the needs of my life. And I think if nothing is the gift of entrepreneurship, it’s that right? But we forget that, and then we build ourselves into these jobs.

So, if that’s where you are, if you’re on the opposite side, you built this huge business that can’t breathe without you, we need to change that, if you built this huge successful business, do you know what you can do? You can change that, but you have to do the work first, my love, and ask yourself, what am I creating in the world?

Who do I want to be? What do I want my life to look like? How many days do I want to work? Where do I want to live? What do I want my days to feel like? Who do I want to spend my time? Be honest with yourself. And if you’re in between, you’re like, “Yeah, I have a great business, no, no…” let’s do that work too. Let’s ask ourselves, let’s put the business over here, let’s look at all of the facets of your life, your health, your relationships, your family, your time with yourself, your self-care, your day-to-day vibe. What do you want that to be? On purpose, cultivated, created, not left over after you’ve spent it all on your business.

It begs the question ultimately, which is, do you believe that that’s possible? Do you believe that it’s possible that you can cultivate a life first and then design a business that feeds it? Or do you have to design a business and then accommodate the business with your life? It’s a question to answer— is it true? Do you want to keep believing it? So, this all came up because there’s been a lot of people who’s just really—it’s just an interesting time.

And I think, whenever we go through these transitions in our lives and in our space and in the world, right? We have a lot of movement, the wisdom you desperately seek, I know is inside of you. Now, sometimes we need help with that. That’s why I do my retreats in Hawaii. I find that it’s incredibly cathartic for me, and it’s incredibly cathartic for the women who come. It’s a way to ground into you, your own know. You’re the best gift you have for yourself, It’s not outside of you.

And in the day-to-day that we live, it’s easy to start to believe that that’s true, it’s easy to start to believe that someone knows how to do your life better than you. But I know if you sit with yourself in the quiet of the morning or the evening, and you just let the wisdom come, you know there’s truth there. And what if you just believed it was possible, and you designed a life, and then you decide, what kind of business will support that life. Give it a shot. Thanks for tuning in.

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