You are the Asset

Kris Plachy: Hello, welcome to Leadership is Feminine. My name is Kris Plachy, and I am your host. And today, we’re going to do a little “Let’s go to leadership and entrepreneurial management” church. Let’s see where this takes us. Here we go!

Well, welcome, welcome, hi, I’m so thrilled to be sharing this time with you. So, if we haven’t met, I’m Kris Plachy, I am a master certified coach and I am a leadership and management expert, and have been working with amazing leaders for what feels like 100 years, but mostly 27. So, can I say quarter of a century? I guess I can. Ew, I’m so old. Okay, I’m working on that.

Anyway, the name of this podcast is Leadership is Feminine. And you’ve probably heard me say that I am a pretty big advocate of women who choose to step into roles, where they are in charge, where they’re the leader. Working with women in business, is a natural outlet for me, given that I am a woman, I have also lead and managed teams, and I also have my own business. So, it’s sort of the trifecta of understanding of what so many of my clients are also going through and working through, as they build the dream that they had in their brain into a tangible deliverable for the rest of the world. This is not for the faint at heart. This is a calling. And there are trepidatious, difficult, hard moments along the way.

So, I have my work in the world that we do, which is our CEO Advisory where we work with women every day, to help you resolve the day-to-day challenges that you face leading and managing and growing and team operations of a company. And I love doing that, because I have absolutely no question in my mind that there is absolutely not one thing you can bring to a call that we will not be able to help you solve. And being able to say that, I know that you all can say that about what you do, right? I know that that’s true for whatever it is that you do.

So, you know that level of like, ugh, like, it’s almost…To be honest, I get mad when people dilly-dally, and, “Well, I don’t know if I should do this.” Like, I don’t even…Stop it! Just get in here so we can resolve these issues? Like, why do we got to keep talking about it? Why are you not solving this problem? It’s so solvable.

I also work with women in different ways. And that’s what I want to talk to you about. Because years and years ago, when I was a young mother with a two-year-old twins and six-year-old son, I was also the director of the team, I had a lot of responsibility. And I had a lot of life just like everybody, just like all of you. And I just always… I was annoyed because the only outlets that seemed to exist for women were Bunco and heavy drinking, to be honest. And, sure, there’s days where that’s fun. And I do not besmirched anybody who loves Bunco. I have yet to meet anyone who really loves Bunco I have met people who like to go play Bunco, but that’s just to get away from whatever else is going on.

And I’m in my early 50s, so there were also parties that you could have like, Pampered Chef and jewelry parties. We went through the gold by party. Did anybody else do that, where you would bring all your gold and…? Anyway, what am I talking about? What I’m talking about is that there were these incredibly artificial ways that women connected. They were like excuses for women to connect with each other. And it always was shallow to me. It never felt meaningful, and yet, I still wanted to connect with women so I would go.

And I’m confident that most of the people that live near me think I’m weird because I don’t want to talk about like the things that people want to talk about. I’m tedious. I want to talk about you and your thoughts and your dreams and your goals and your self-esteem and your self-worth, and I want you to talk to me about that about me and I want us to lift each other up and I want to grow and I want to challenge ourselves and I want to do all these things. I do not want to throw dice with you and get hammered, like, it doesn’t solve anything. So you might say, “Well, why do you always got to solve things?” I don’t know, I was built this way.

So, I kept doing my thing. And then I got into my own business. And naturally, we just bumped into women. And then I started having these phenomenons, where…So I did my first Hawaii retreat, that was in 2012, and it was amazing. And I’m like, “Okay, this is amazing. I’m going to do this again.” So, then I just kept doing that.

But here’s what started happening—started meeting more and more women through the experience of the retreat, who were like me, in that, they didn’t like any of that stuff anyway, they’re not the Big Good Girls Gone Wild, kind of clan. And that’s okay. I love that for people. Again, I have no judgment, I just…You can’t not be a Good Girls Gone Wild girl, and go to those, you don’t enjoy it. Just like a Good Girls Gone Wild kind of person isn’t going to enjoy probably what I do in Hawaii, it’s too boring. It’s too quiet. It’s too peaceful and serene. And clearly, I’m sure, not enough drinking.

But what I realized is there’s so many women who feel this absence of connection with other women, until they meet other women, who in my case, are also entrepreneurs, who are also running their own companies, who also want to skip all that part and want to have substantive, like really interesting, deep, meaningful conversations rooted in wisdom and guidance and knowing versus the kind of baby strollers to buy. And so there’s a whole y’all and people are trying to fill it. And of course, we’re watching that run its course through our society with the buffering that we’re all doing to avoid the loneliness that so many of us feel.

So, I just did two full weeks in Hawaii, myself. I lead my Sage CEO retreat, and my Sage CEO program will actually be opening for registration here soon, just as a heads up, but Sage CEO is invite-only. You have to be someone that I know, and that we have met to talk about what the goals of sage are, and what your goals are. So, if you think you would qualify for sage, which would mean that you are running a multimillion-dollar business.

And the reason that that matters is not because they care about how much money you make, but because the way that you think and the place that you’re in in your life is really part of the journey of the sage. If you’re still in survival mode, which we all have to move through, you’re not ready, because you can’t be worrying about your time and your finances and your availability. And that’s why your team has to be pretty well built. You have to feel comfortable financially, and you have to feel free with your time. And most women are not there until they’re well beyond the first few million in their business. And after they’ve worked with us in How to CEO. Although not every sage needs to do How to CEO, I just have to make sure you meet the pieces and parts.

So, if you’re interested in Sage CEO, it’s a year-long mastermind very small four trips a year, beautiful locations, high-level engagement coaching, transformation, with other women like you, intimate small, think small, not 50 people, not 30 people, not probably even 20 people, probably more like 12. If that’s something you want to learn more about, you can email me at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> and just address it to me and say, “Kris, I really want to know about sage. Here’s a little bit about me…” and we can take it from there.

So, I did the first few days and why with my Sage clients, and it was amazing. And then I had a little time to myself and then I did a second retreat. And the Hawaii retreat is a retreat I do several times a year; you do not have to be in Sage, but you do have to be a client or an alumni client. And that’s four days in Hawaii, where we do incredible, powerful work. One of my clients said, at the end of it she said, “You know you just took us on like a shamanic journey, right?” Like yeah, we didn’t even like smoke peyote, or I don’t know, ashwagandha. I don’t know. What’s this stuff people do? I don’t do any of that. We just dive into you because you’re amazing.

But here’s why I’m bringing this up. I started doing this Hawaii thing because my soul craved it. I love Hawaii. I believe that where I go in Hawaii is pure magic. It’s unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. And I believe that there is incredible healing and restorative, transformational energy available to you, when you allow yourself to be alone. If you’re a woman and you’re listening to this, I’m going to bet money, you are rarely alone. You might feel lonely, and be in a crowd, but you are rarely alone.

And that ability to give yourself a week in a gorgeous location alone, in and of itself, is part of the growth, because so many women won’t do it. They don’t think they’re worth it. They don’t think it’s fair. They don’t think they deserve it. It doesn’t feel right to them, that they would go to Hawaii and their kids don’t go or their best friend doesn’t go or their partner doesn’t go, what will my employees think if I take a week off, and they just go to Hawaii? I don’t know. What will they think, Marsha? What’s going to happen? Will they think you’re a horrible person? Or will they admire you for taking care of yourself? I can tell you that the husbands or partners of the people of my clients who come to Hawaii, they ask them, “Hey, when are you going back to Hawaii?” Because they like to you came back as: a rested, thoughtful, self-loved and self-fulfilled woman.

And so I feel like I need to carry this message to you, please invest in yourself. You are the asset, no one’s going to do it for you. And all the thoughts that you have about worthiness and “I don’t know if I can take that much time.” And “I don’t know if I should spend this kind of money.” And whatever it is. It doesn’t even have to be if you’re working with me, it could be anyone else. Anything that you’re thinking like that lies. And if someone’s talking to you like that, that’s nice. You alone are worth it. You are worth time alone, you are worth personal transformation, you are worth investing in yourself, you are worth beautiful, meaningful, rich relationships with people who listen to you and hear you and acknowledge you and validate you and challenge you.

You are worth that, simply because of who you are, not because of anything else, not because of how much money you make, not because of where you live, not because of who you’re married to, not because of anything. And certainly, what you haven’t done yet should never be used against you as that you aren’t worth something. “I haven’t made this much money. I haven’t done this. I haven’t done that. I haven’t accomplished this yet.” Who cares? Come on, what race are you in? Did you get one? I didn’t enter a race. I do not have a number on my chest. I am not running in a marathon. There is nobody competing with me--not that I know of. I’m certainly not competing with anyone else. I just want to be better than I was. I want to understand more than I did. I want to explore why some things are so difficult for me and others are easy. I want to understand why some conversations are so triggering for me and others are not. And I want to work with women who think like that too.

The world is huge. Life is amazing. We have so much we can do here. We have more opportunity now as women than we’ve ever had in our lives. And if we stick together, we’re not going to lose it. But y’all, it’s getting messy. You have got to take care of yourself, you have got to advocate for yourself, you have got to step into your voice in your power. Because we need you, mama, we do not need you shrinking in the corner feeling insecure and filled with self-doubt. And if that’s who you are, get with women who will pull you out, not with women who will validate that.

I fiercely recommend anyone you have in your life right now, who encourages you to believe that you are incapable or who enjoys sinking into that low vibration with you to validate themselves, that you eliminate that from your space. There is no use for it; other than to waste time and waste your precious life.

So, whenever I come back from my trip from Hawaii, I have of course full of these ideas. I’ve said this so many times. I feel like I go there and I talk to the ocean and the ocean and I have these beautiful conversations and then the waves hold my wisdom. And when I return, the waves whisper them back to me. It’s like this restorative experience, it comes right back. And I don’t make a lot of sense out of it. I have to be honest with you. It’s all just magic to me; it doesn’t really have any logic. But I guess it doesn’t have to.

And then I watch these women come and they have each other and the, the value one another, and they’re so lovely with each other, and they connect and they hold each other up. The women who thrive in this environment, they’re not interested in pulling other people down, why? You can’t come all that way. And feel compelled to bring other people down with you, you have to make a commitment to yourself that if you truly want to transform the way that you feel, the way that you think the way that you show up in the world, in a way that allows you to step into your next version, not a better version, not a not another version, not some other version that you don’t even know about. But really just revealing, like, this has all been inside of me all this time. All this time, I can know this about myself. But in order to do that, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable to get there. And I know you want to be with other women who are willing to do the same thing.

So, if that’s you, if you’re a woman who’s feeling like I have so much in me, and I don’t have a place in space to connect with women who are that way with in the way that I am, I do, I feel like I just don’t have a lot of good girlfriends near where I live. This is stuff I hear all the time. But you’re successful, right? On paper, you got this cool business, you got this work, you got money, it’s time to value you well beyond anyone else. I just talked with the client today is, you know, hasn’t given herself a raise in however many years, she makes sure everything else is covered before she pays herself. And then she feels like she’s in scarcity all the time. By the time we’re done with the call, she had figured out how to give herself a 76% raise, all she needed was permission. And I feel so grateful that we have an environment where women can come to do that work together. But I worry because there’s so many other women who don’t.

So, whether it’s working with me and the work that I do in our CEO Advisory in getting involved in coming to Hawaii or considering the Sage CEO, if you’re a multi seven figure business and you’re looking for that high-level mastermind of transformation—not what launch strategy to use, and what emails to send, not that, it’s, who do I need to become, I actually have already built this successful business. Now what the hell do I do? I got half a life left to live, what the hell am I going to do with it? These are the questions that my clients are asking. I was just coaching a client should probably hear this, right? We were just doing some Voxer coaching. And she said, ‘I just want to have it all.” Like what does that mean? She said, “That’s a good question. I don’t know.” Like, well, you’re saying it, not me. What does it mean to have it all? But that’s an overwhelming commentary if you don’t know the answer, right? It’s a little overwhelming, telling yourself you want it all, if you haven’t been able to clarify what that means.

So, what is the point of this podcast? I just want you to hear me tell you that you’re amazing. And on any given day, you might question that. Sometimes you might question that 112 times, but I know it’s true. And you have days where you really are stepping into your power and your voice and you feel really good about it. You have to look at, okay, what happened on that day? And then there are days where you really question what you’re doing and you don’t know. And you have to look at, what’s going on on that day? And it doesn’t matter how big your business gets in, it doesn’t matter how successful you are and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business, you’re still going to have days, both like those days—great days, not so great days.

But what we know now more than anything after going through several years of COVID is we need one another and we need to be together in person. And we need to take care of each other and we need to hold each other up and we need to support one another. And for women especially, we have worked so hard, our mothers worked so hard, we have so many people who came before us who created this space in place for us, and I want us to continue to model with that growth looks like. We’re the next generation to transform and to create opportunity for more women. Are we doing that well? Could we do it better?

And I think the first thing you do is you say yes, I am worth it! I am worth whatever it is that you tell yourself you are worth. And that could be anything from material stuff, to experiences to how you’re treated, to how you’re spoken to, to what people deliver in your company to how employees work and their effort, all of it, you deserve, not because you’ve earned it, not because you’re super special, but just because of who you are, and that you’re a human being an incredible life, however you define that. And I would certainly always welcome the opportunity to help you believe that even more because I’m not giving up unbelieving that for you. And there are days I don’t believe it for myself. And I have people that I call who remind me, and I am so grateful to them.

Sometimes we can’t read the message on the bottle, right? Because we’re inside it. So, I’m reading your message for you. And your message says: You’re a badass, you’re amazing. You can do whatever you decide to do. Self-doubt is a lie. Anyone who promotes your insecurities to your face, or behind your back is off limits, invest in yourself, you are the asset. I’ll talk to you next time.

Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some real good in the world. You probably didn’t start your business to manage people, but here you are, having to figure out how to manage people to get work done. And maybe it’s not going so well. So, head on over to <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/howtoceo">www.krisplachy.com/howtoceo</a> and let’s talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.