Let me start by saying this:

You get to define what success looks like for you.

Period.

No guru, no expert, no thought leader, no best friends, no significant others, no moms, no dads, no one can tell you that you are only successful at XYZ arbitrary benchmark that truly doesn’t matter.

You’ve probably subconsciously have adopted some beliefs of what you think success means, whether it be 6 figures, or 4 hour work weeks, or living in Bali, or whatever.

I want to challenge you to take some time to assess where those beliefs maybe came from and if those are what success truly means to you or if it’s just what you think it’s supposed to mean to you.

To help you out a bit, here is what success means to me. For me, success to me looks different every day. What that truly means is that success is the freedom to choose.

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I am overall a successful person because I’ve created a life where I have that choice. There’s no money measurement, no time measurement, no wedding ring, no house bought, no kids, no clients tied to my version of success.

In my definition of success, it means having the choice. That might seem really woo to some of you and deep and weird, but just being honest.

Yours? Yours could look like you make 6 figures. Yours could look like you sleep in until 9 am every day. Yours could look like a fancy car. Or first-class flights. Or time to volunteer at your kid’s school. It’s up to you!

If you’ve ever read my content, you’ve read my disclaimer that everything is based on my experiences.  I have some very distinct thoughts and ideas about how to run your business online. It’s a combination of my experiences, what I’ve read, what I’ve studied, what my mentors and coaches have instilled in me, and most importantly: what I value.

Notice how those are all things that are personal to me and my experience? Yeah. I’m more than happy to give ideas, to share things, to even teach things, to give feedback, etc., but I always always always put the disclaimer out there that these are my thoughts and experiences.

I always want my audience to read what I have to say - take what they need from it - and put their own spin on it.

Now I know a lot of that is easier said than done, but I believe in creative problem solving and I believe that everyone has the ability to figure out their own shit in the way that best serves them.

Maybe my ideas or insights will help you in that process, but it’s not my role or my job to just straight up say ‘do step 1. Do step 2. Do step 3.’ but rather, here are the steps that I took, how do those feel or work for you? Is there anything from that that you can take and adjust for yourself?

You define your success.

You define what it means to be successful.

It is ever-evolving. And it is not up to any marketing guru or thought leader or bullshit con artist.

My point here is that it’s completely 100% up to you whether or not you want to see your days, your weeks, your months, your business as successful. And that you get to set whatever milestones you want and feel proud of whatever thing you’ve done or are doing and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And to build on that more, I want to point out that even if successful to you means having a huge corporation and 500 employees and you’re not even remotely close to that goal yet, that doesn’t mean you AREN’T successful. You don’t have to hold back or wait to feel good.

You don’t have to deprive yourself of the good feels because you are in progress. Set milestones. Set smaller goals. Let success happen more along the way and like we talked about last week, take time to celebrate the wins so that you can keep having more and more wins during your journey!

How are you defining success for your life and business? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Instagram!

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I’ve shared bits and pieces of this idea around before, but it deserves its whole own blog post because this is an important lesson. We’re talking about answering your own questions!

Okay so how this breaks down for-realsies, is acknowledging how powerful and wildly capable you actually are. The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that we aren’t good enough, smart enough, capable enough, worthy enough.

This shows up in a hundred different ways in your day to day life but one of the biggest ways I’ve noticed in our online business space is seeking so much external validation and answers, rather than knowing our own truths.

In my coaching practice, we spend a lot of time on this, I label it under the word confidence. We’re conditioned to think we have to find the answer to everything. I think in large part that is due to our education system, at least here in the US, for teaching us how to research instead of necessarily how to think and problem solve. 

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Actually, interestingly enough Will and I were watching Chef’s Table the other night and a chef on there was talking about this idea in his own world and industry. He was saying how good chefs can cook well, but great chefs invent new ways of cooking.

It was super powerful, and so relevant to my thoughts as of late so it felt like a message I was meant to receive, you know?

You can be a good business owner. You can follow the rules, check the boxes, and probably make some decent money. But I believe there’s a need in all of us, deep down, to be great. Maybe a great business owner, maybe a great friend, maybe a great mother, I can’t answer that for you… but to be great.  

So anyway, we’re taught to research, right? To just Google it. To, hold on, let me look it up real quick. And while that does serve us for some smaller things that maybe you just don’t know - like the definition of ubiquitous or the distance from Charleston to Palm Springs, sure, fine, look that ish up all day.

I see a problem starting when we start to look up ways of existing, things we’re supposed to believe, the right way to do stuff in business… when a client comes to me and asks, well how should I do it? Am I ready? Is this a good idea? Those kinds of questions…

They aren’t for me.

They aren’t for Google. 

They are just for you.

When I first came around to this idea and realization I used a pendulum a lot. If you’re not familiar it’s a tool for communicating with your subconscious. It won’t move on its own, but it will move based on your true intentions. So it’s limited in what it can answer, right?

Generally gotta stick with like Yes/No type questions but what it’s so powerful for is learning to trust that instinct or gut feeling as actually just your intuition. Inner being. Source.

So say you ask, “is launching this right now a good idea?” Well first of all - the question alone speaks volumes.

Clearly some part of you feels it’s not a good idea or you wouldn’t be questioning it at all.

Acknowledge that, first and foremost. Then the pendulum will move to indicate Yes or No — it’s not magic, it’s your subconscious affecting the tiniest muscle movements in your body. You could do this even without a pendulum and just use your body as long as you determine what is a Yes and what is a No.  

Let’s say it moves Yes. Okay — then at a subconscious level you know it is a good idea BUT that doesn’t mean you still don’t have some resistance, or else you wouldn’t have even asked the question, right? So I’d take that as an indicator to still dive in and explore why you are worried about it, why you think it may not be a good time, etc.

Let’s say it moves No. Okay — then at a subconscious level, you don’t think it’s right to launch now. That doesn’t mean don’t launch EVER, it probably means that you know you will self-sabotage, so still, work on why you are scared of launching first. Either way, there’s work to be done or you wouldn’t have asked the question at all, right?

Okay, that was a bit of a tangent about pendulums, but I think it’s a great practice if you are wanting to learn to hear your intuition or source better and recognize it for what it is, versus brushing it off all the time (like we tend to do).

But my point here is that you have the answers inside of you.

You know what to do or not to do. I believe so fully that we all know exactly the next step to take, it’s just a matter of getting out of our own ways and that’s where the inner work comes into play. 

A big issue that I see come up time and time again when it comes to hearing that voice and honoring it is that we struggle to trust ourselves. 

I don’t know of a study on this, but I’d assume that the people we see out there who are very successful in whatever ways have a high amount of trust in their abilities. They trust that they’ll do what they say they’ll do. They trust they are capable enough of doing it well. 

The opposite of that may be where you are struggling right now.

You want 10 clients, or you want a half a million dollars, or you want to launch that program… but at a deep level, you don’t trust you can do it. And therefore you don’t take the actions to make it happen, or you self sabotage. 

So to get back to the point of this post, part of answering questions on your own is hearing the answer and trusting that it is the right answer for you, in that moment. To get there, you’ve gotta build up that trust. An exercise I’ve helped people through is taking time to first find what the real distrust is: 

• Is it your ability to follow through?

• Your ability to make the right decision?

• Your ability to commit wholly?

And when you know what the real issue is — find proof otherwise. So if you’ve come to the conclusion that you actually don’t believe in yourself to follow through, find 10 examples in your life when you did.

It doesn’t have to be ground-breaking, it can be that you followed through on your decision to eat Chipotle for dinner. But start to find evidence that directly opposes that limiting belief. 

When I work with clients 1:1  we also use techniques to release those kinds of limiting beliefs entirely, which is a powerful practice. This actually gets a whole session in my 1:1 program and we work through multiple limiting beliefs that are holding the client back and the results are so incredible.

A belief that I think we all struggle with from time to time and the reason we look outside of ourselves for answers so often is that we assume someone else can do it better than we can. Someone else knows more than we do.

And what that truly does is put the blame or pressure on THEM to be correct, it’s us deflecting and not taking ownership over our lives, right? When we do that we are no longer living at cause and reverting back to old patterns of living at effect.

I want to bring up a pretty WOO topic to talk through my belief about diverting to other people for answers.

Here’s what I believe at this point in my life. We are all souls having a human experience, and the same energy that flows through you flows through me and it also heck, it flows through Beyonce too, y’all.

And all of that energy comes from a source, or the divine, or even God to some people, and it’s the same. It’s the same electric current floating through all of us and by that acceptance alone, no one can answer my questions better than me, because when my answers are everyone else’s answers too.

I know that’s diving a bit deep right now, and it’s okay if that idea doesn’t resonate with you fully. But I do think about this: why would anybody else know what’s best for you?

Nobody else knows you as well as you know yourself, so you are clearly the expert when it comes to you.

I love sharing these ideas and concepts with you because I know first hand just how powerful and life-changing these things are.

What do you think about this idea of answering your own questions?! Let me know over on Instagram!

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It feels like for my entire life I’ve wanted to be a morning person, but am actually not so much a morning person. We live in a society where waking up early is celebrated and you are given so much praise if you manage to accomplish 10+ things before the average person stirs. But, alas, this just wasn’t how my body operated naturally. I was more of a 9am person naturally, and imagine the shock and horror of all my 5am club friends when they’ve already solved world hunger and I’m just now hitting snooze for what would be the first of ten times.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I spent a lot of time being bitter about it. I felt like something was WRONG with me, inherently. Why was I so tired?! Why did I not even remember turning off my alarm?! I remember in college I got an app that made you solve math problems to turn off the alarm (now this was on the crappiest/cheapest Android smartphone). The first day it went off and I groggily rolled over and started solving the problem. I liked math and considered myself a Math Superstar and so I had put the level at “hardest.” WELL, I couldn’t get it right. I was livid. The alarm was blaring and despite my multiple efforts I couldn’t solve the problem! 

I later read the reviews, which were terrible, and found out that most of the equations did not follow simple order of operations and therefore were not solvable.

BUT, in that moment, I instead ripped the battery out of my phone, threw it across the room, and fell back to sleep.

That’s one of many stories about me and sleep. Once my sister proclaimed she thought I was dead and she tried to shake me from my zombie-like stupor. And when I took a poetry class, my professor said she thought it was “odd” that I chose to write a poem about accidental napping.

Clearly, sleep is a Big Fucking Deal™ to me.

When I set out on my entrepreneurial journey, it felt like, LITERALLY, everyone was talking about the 5am club. People were working out, cooking and eating a real breakfast, raising children, cleaning their house and their inbox all before the sun rose. Not to mention journaling, meditating, getting in a quick yoga flow, and also solving world hunger. I, on the other hand, was turning over in my bed and opening my laptop to start work from bed around 9-9:30. I felt like a fraud, a fuck-up, like this would never work for me because of a stupid wake up time.

As I grew more successful, better habits did form. I actually got out of bed, brushed my teeth, and put on a bra (sometimes). But the wake up time never really improved. And this sense of guilt always lingered. In the back of my mind, I thought, well dammit, if ONLY I could get up early, then I’d be a millionaire.

This belief lingered through all of my up-leveling, through hitting six figures, through being booked out and then overbooked out. Honestly, I remember the moment that the belief got challenged and rocked and I was finally given this permission slip I had unintentionally been seeking for years.

I went to a retreat with some business friends and at some point someone asked what our normal morning routines were. One of the girls there who I really admired lazily replied that she gets up around 9 or 9:30 and eventually starts work by 11.

I think I died and went to heaven.

Because here she was, in allllll of her success (multi 6-figures, y’all) saying that SHE DIDN’T WAKE UP EARLY. Like that the belief disappeared. I felt cured. I felt like a new woman. She has no idea the impact such a simple response had on me, but it was epic.

I’ve since passed this permission slip onto many others. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are perfectly fine in every single way possible just as you are.

The funny thing here is that once I dropped this crazy belief system, I noticed something interesting. I started getting up a bit earlier. Like, naturally. It’s like those crazy stories where people say I FINALLY STOPPED DIETING AND LOST 100 POUNDS. The mind is a funny thing, y’all. 

But the point is, I actually don’t care what time I wake up. I try to keep it consistent because I know for me that leads to better quality sleep, but there’s no shame or guilt around the times. I built my business schedule around honoring that I will not be available to others until 11 and even if I get up at 7 (which often I do! Naturally!) I just spend the morning on ME, for ME.

The moral of this story isn’t to say that 5 or 7 or 9 or 11am wins. It’s to say that you are fine, exactly as you are, and if you could stop shaming yourself for every single thing you do, life would be a lot more simpler, exciting, and fun.

And that’s my big problem with “morning routines” in general. I don’t doubt the effectiveness for some people, heck, I do things pretty routinely too. BUT, this idea of telling people they HAVE to do all of these things to be successful or win life is a recipe for disaster. It leads to a shame spiral if you don’t manage to complete it, and it ends up with people just checking the boxes and not actually getting anything out of their said routine. 

It becomes just writing your gratitude, without actually feeling it.

It becomes just saying your affirmations, without actually believing it.

It turns you into a wellness zombie chugging celery juice and doing yoga without even considering why.

That’s not the point here. My mornings are sacred. My gratitude practice involves writing and daydreaming and meditation and visualizing all the things. That takes time! If I was trying to cram it into a 5 minute window on my 50 item checklist to do in one hour…. It wouldn’t work the same, right?! And all of that to say, you don’t have to do it my way. But you do have to do it with some sort of intention and meaning. It’s not just an item to check off.

Here’s what I did to find my best morning situation:

First, I fucking relaxed. So after *the event*, I noticed I was naturally getting up a bit earlier. And I thought to myself, I want to use this time for me, whatever that means. I truly didn’t know, but I knew I didn’t want to jump right into work.

So one morning when I got up, I just went to the couch and sat there and relaxed. And I let ideas come to me to see what would feel good to do. Of course my mind went to all the things I “should” do, but I asked myself if I really wanted to actually do those things. And then I put on my scientist hat, and did some things, and recognized what felt good and didn’t.

I didn’t look to external sources to tell me what to do.

I went internal and judged how things made me feel.

And if I LIKED them, then I did them more.

And if I DIDN’T like them, I released them. No big deal.

There are absolutely no rules, just FYI. Even the rules you are thinking of right now aren’t actually rules. Just conditioning and habits and ideas you’ve adopted as beliefs. Except maybe feeding your cats first thing, that might be a rule. At least it is in my household, because they will not leave you the heck alone without some breakfast.

Anyway, I found my own routine and here’s the shocker: it changes. OFTEN!

And that’s okay!

How I look at it now is that I want to get myself into a feeling and a vibration of my next level success. So sometimes that’s meditating, sometimes that’s journaling, sometimes that’s pulling cards, today that looks like writing this blog post because I felt inspired to do so. I want to take whatever action feels like it’ll help me BE the person I want to be. For me, that person values freedom and flexibility, so of course, I need to start doing that now.

So, I guess that’s the consistent thing that happens. I ask myself, who do I need to BE to have everything I want in life. And I let that answer inform what comes next. Sometimes I have 3 hours to play with this idea, and sometimes I have 1. The biggest piece of advice, or thought I want to pass onto you, is to do what you can to release the shame around not doing things the way that xyz book tells you to. 

You can be everything you want to be using exactly what you have right now. There’s nothing left to fix or change. 

Do you feel inspired and ready to start playing by your own rules? Hit me up on Instagram and let me know your biggest takeaway!

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Attention all online business owners and entrepreneurs: let’s band together and stop hustling in 2020. I’m serious. Let’s say no to the rise and grind mentality, the 80 hour work weeks, and the “I’ll just bring my laptop onto the couch while we watch this movie, babe” mindset. You in? No? Still a little on the fence and attached to the workaholic identity? It’s okay… keep reading!

People say you have to hustle because they believe they have to hustle, and you know that ol’ misery-loves-company-thing? Yeah, it’s true. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, studied, and learned in this online space is that some of the loudest voices saying you have to hustle and work-work-work are speaking from THEIR experience of hustling way too hard and work-work-work-ing themselves to death. In their paradigm, in their reality, they believe that is the truth because… for them it is. But here are the facts: THAT’S not a fact.

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Hustling 25/8 to run your business gets you…

Nowhere fast. 

Nowhere long-term.

And nowhere good, healthy, exciting, fun, sustainable, inspirational…. You catch my drift?

It gets you on the burnt out, overwhelmed, dreading work train which makes stops very often at procastination-station, throw-in-the-towel-city, and hate-my-business-land. 

But don’t take MY word for it. Literally Google burnout, adrenal fatigue, or exhaustion.

These things are real, and you are really going to have a hard time building that incredible empire, impacting people, and changing the world if you actually physically cannot get off the couch because the sense of impending doom hovering over you.

So yeah, real anti-hustle over here.

What I’ve noticed: a lot of people that get caught up in hustling through their business (and their lives) have…

1. No idea what they are actually doing. They’ve ended up half-assing a lot of strategies that they don’t fully understand (because they are mimicking what they see others doing, but don’t know the behind-the-scenes).

2. A lack of belief in their abilities to actually create their dream life or business. They are band-aiding over their fear and mindset issues with WORK-WORK-WORK messages that might get a quick win here or there but won’t last.

3. A dependency on sheer willpower, grit (whatever the f* that is), and caffeine (or essential oils, whatever) that has completely clouded out WHY they actually started their business in the first place and has just become an almost-drug-like-addiction to the hustle. 

It’s honestly super sad to think about, because I think we all have incredible messages to get out there, to share, to help people, to make a positive impact… yet that cannot happen from a place of unhealthy hustle. It’s sad, dangerous, and straight up poisonous to think that all that matters is how hard you work. The truth of that is someone will always work harder than you — someone has less kids, more time, more money, a more supportive spouse, etc. than you — so if that’s all that matters… well, honestly, you’re f*cked. 

So now that you might feel a bit personally attacked (I’m sorry, it’s tough love!) let's talk about an alternative way to approach this thing called being a business owner. 

It’s called alignment, and y’all, it’s really nice. It’s lets you take breaks, rest, and be inspired. It lets you create something that matters, that you are proud of, and that will actually last you the rest of your working-life (if you want that). It lets you watch TV at night with your partner with no guilt, and wake up and like… enjoy your morning (what the what?!). 

Alignment allows you to take deliberate and inspired action that actually moves the needle in your business. It allows you to stop comparing yourself (and your work ethic, or ability to ‘power-through’) to others. It allows you to see big, overwhelming projects as a set of smaller, intentional steps that are so, so, so doable. It allows you to BE the version of yourself that runs the sustainable, healthy, happy business you so desire. It’s the magical solution you’ve been hunting for on all those nights you couldn’t sleep because you drank too many cups of coffee and your brain is racing.

So here’s the thing that pisses people off about this conversation: they’ll cry out — YOU CAN’T JUST MEDITATE YOUR WAY TO A PROFITABLE BUSINESS.

Okay, so true. First of all, I didn’t say that. Second of all, you should try meditating with all that anger and yelling (sheesh!)

Alignment brings about inspired or aligned action. There’s still action. There’s still the ACT of doing things. You still gotta put something up for sale, work with clients, sell a product, whatever. But it doesn’t have to be ridden with this negative, anxious, overwhelming energy that makes you hate your business. It can feel good. Fun, even!

Deep down, you know what I am saying is true. It’s the truest truth there is: we overcomplicate things, make things way harder than they have to be, and generally like to run on this adrenaline-rush-cortisol-overload mixture because… well, because it’s all we really know. But there is another way, I promise you that.

If you’re ready to explore that other way, here are some things for you to reflect on:

First: What are you doing in your business right now that you absolutely hate and dread doing and like optionally choose to fold laundry or scoop the catbox instead of doing? Do you have to be doing that? Who said you had to do it? Is that 100% true?

Second: What about your business do you love doing? What gets pushed to the top of the to-do list because you are excited about it? How can you do more of that or explore more opportunities like that

Disclaimer, for the haters: Yes, you still have to do taxes and boring ish like that. I’m not saying to tell the IRS that it wasn’t in alignment for you. But, if it’s a really big issue for you… that should be on the top of your outsource list! (Check out Bench.co* — best decision I ever made!)

Third: What do you think will happen if you actually stopped hustling and made an effort to focus on alignment? What’s the worst case scenario? What’s the best? Explore your limiting beliefs here to see what you are actually resisting (because logically you can accept that alignment > hustle, but unconsciously you are probably still resisting it. We tend not to like change. That’s why I coach people through these concepts!)

And if you’re looking to really start changing your beliefs and thoughts around this idea, I have a few of my own personal mantras that you could use (or adapt, whatever):

1. The Rest Is The Work

2. It Is Safe For Me To Say No

3. How Can I Allow This To Be More Fun?

4. This Gets To be Easy

Obviously feel free to come up with your own, but “having to hustle” is a belief that I want to encourage everyone to rewrite. Your business depends on it!

Are you ready to give up the hustle-mentality? Share with me in a comment or on Instagram what this brings up for you!

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