Speaker 1: (00:09)
the idea, the concept behind this week's episode came to me. How many of them do actually? So I will often be reading something or reading a book, listening to another podcast, or most recently listening in a room on clubhouse, which by the way, if you're not on clubhouse, come find me, get on clubhouse and come find me. Um, I was listening in, into a room where we were talking about, uh, it was a, it was a business conversation basically. And Jasmine Ivy was hosting the room and she said, entrepreneurship requires so much of you because it changes you. And I was like, you know, and then it hit me like that little mind blown emoji. That's how I felt in that moment.

Speaker 1: (00:58)
Um, because I don't think that many of us think about entrepreneurship like that when we're going in. Right. And so oftentimes when I hear something like that, or I read something in a book and recently, most recently I finished reading, uh, Glen and oils untamed. And so I've been really, uh, there's experts in different parts of it that really sit with me. And so my process is usually that I will listen to the audio or listen to some type of content and process it and sit with it. And if it's something that I think pertains to my doula community, and what I will usually do is try to think about how I can share about it and how I can, well, how I can share the lesson, um, that I'm taking from whatever I'm learning and applying it in my business or what I'm seeing in my business and explain it in a way that I think will be really helpful to you all.

Speaker 1: (01:50)
And so that's what I did here was I sat with that statement. Entrepreneurship requires so much of you because it changes you. Um, I sat with it and thought a lot about that. And the longer I did, the more I realized how much being a business owner and being on an entrepreneurial journey is like birth, because that's just how my mind works. I tend to find these examples that compare so much of the way we do business to the way we prep and the way we actually do birth. Right. And so I think it works out really well for me and for you guys, I don't know. Maybe it's just the way my mind thinks, but I think I hope that it's helpful. And so what I want to do is break down how I'm processing that statement through the lens of birth.

Speaker 1: (02:36)
So when we give birth, the way I think about this is we are stretched to the max and I'm not just talking about our vaginal opening stretching, but all four planes of the body. And several episodes back I talked about, I referenced this article that I read recently on goop, which is I'm going to the Paltrow's platform. And there was an article about the four planes of the body and how it's not just physical, mental, um, but there are others, right? And so when we are giving birth, our physical body expands obviously right during pregnancy and even more so during birth to during pregnancy to create a human and then during birth to bring that human, you know, into its own, right, like into its own space, um, outside of our body, on the planet. So our physical body, that's one of the planes. There's also three others, mental, spiritual, and emotional.

Speaker 1: (03:38)
So your mental body, your thoughts during birth are also stretched, right? And so that's why we guide pregnant people throughout their pregnancy. If you're working closely with pregnant people, you're probably guiding them through mental exercises, meditations, and visualizations and things like that. What we're doing is practicing the work of shifting our fears, you know, because when you're in labor, those fearful thoughts can come up and you've, if you're in the birth world, you've probably heard of that cycle, right? The fear tension pain cycle. So when we do the work of shifting, you know, practicing, shifting our fears to reduce our tension in our body in turn, it changes the way that we experience the, you know, discomforts and sometimes pain of birth. So our mental body is stretched. The third is your spiritual body, which is your connection to divine. What, however you want to think about this to God, to divine source, um, insert, whatever belief you have of a higher being here.

Speaker 1: (04:47)
You know, this is totally, you know, no judge zone. So whatever you believe in here, and oftentimes people that have are in birth say that giving birth help, you know, they feel closer to God or to divine than ever before. Right. The veil is then during birth and I've heard it described as the closest we felt. Right. And I've, I've described it that way because that's how mean. That's how I felt. I literally screamed out for God when I was pushing out Amani on the bedroom floor. Amani is my third, if you haven't heard. Um, and if you've also given birth Sans drugs or, you know, at all, you know, perhaps, perhaps you felt it too. I mean, I know that when I did it without the drugs, so when I had my natural birth, no epidural, that was when I felt it the most.

Speaker 1: (05:40)
That was when I felt that connection the most. Um, so, you know, you may have felt it in other types of birth as well, right? So that's your spiritual body being stretched. You know, the fourth is your emotional body. Your, and it makes sense, right? If you think about your emotions are at an all time high during birth with hormones, like oxytocin, endorphins, adrenaline, prolactin, all pumping through your system. So we reached that emotional hormonal peak, right? Like it's, it's climbing throughout pregnancy and then really reaches that peak of all of these other hormones during birth. So we're stretched and with each birth we're new and where were you born?

Speaker 1: (06:41)
And birth requires so much of you because it too changes you. Right? And so does running your doula business. If you're a brand new doula and you don't think of yourself yet as an entrepreneur, um, if you're not working for an agency or hospital, if you're working on your own and you're doing it yourself, you are an entrepreneur, you are running your own business. You are a business owner, a small business owner, right. And doing that, stretches us on all four planes. And I'm going to explain how so again, in the same order, let's start with the physical body in our physical body. We might stay up all night long after the kids go to bed to finish that birth class curriculum or to finish, um, putting together graphics for Instagram or writing the about me page on our website or.dot, dot all of these things that we do.

Speaker 1: (07:43)
All the things in the early stages of our business. And it can be exhausting on the physical body, right. Even if it's something that you're not out, you know, mowing yards, it's still physically a lot, you know, it's the body that stays up working and it's mental too. So part two, number two is the mental body. There's the mental stretching that is creating content, right? And like this, this also is sometimes letting our fearful thoughts take up too much real estate in our head. You know, it's again, a lot like birth, right? So the mental practice that we are teaching people during pregnancy to prep for birth, you can do very similar mental exercises throughout entrepreneurship. And actually I highly recommend doing them. I do them as often as possible. Right. And so focusing on our thoughts and being really conscious of how much space, fearful thoughts take up, you know what though? So in business, it's not going to be, is this going to hurt? Like it would for contractions in business, it's going to be, um, what if I post this thing? What if I post this picture?

Speaker 2: (08:58)
Sure.

Speaker 1: (09:01)
If I make an offer and sell something on Instagram, what if nobody signs up? What if I'm not good enough? What if I'm not tall enough? Short enough old enough, young enough, skinny enough, blonde enough, dark enough. What if I'm too light too dark too. This too, that too fat, too skinny, too round, too curvy. What if my jaws crooked? What if my teeth are too yellow, all these ridiculous thoughts that can really fill up our heads with so much noise and sometimes can put us in that place of tension. And I mean, some of those thoughts really can be painful. Right. So doing that work in our business of exercising,

Speaker 2: (09:44)
Our mental.

Speaker 1: (09:46)
And so the kind of thing that I do. So you feel like, what the hell are you talking about, Nicole, um, is controlling your thoughts, right? So it's being, it starts with becoming aware of what we're thinking. Right? So catching yourself in the middle of those thoughts, catching yourself and acknowledging saying, wait a minute. Okay. Right now I'm hesitating to do this thing to move forward on this thing, because I'm feeling this right, because I haven't yet lost my 20 pounds or because I haven't yet finished this 21 day. I don't know, um, challenge where I'm supposed to, you know, whatever the hell who knows, like shrink myself, which has, seems to be the theme in January or what if I'm not ready to do this thing because I'm still wearing glasses. And I haven't bought contacts in two years and I don't want to go on video until I have contacts or, uh, what if I have a breakout or what if I have a fever blister? Or what if I have, I'm trying to think any, anything, right. What if I'm too old and I have wrinkles and I feel like my white hairs are showing, cause I haven't been to get my hair dyed in months. Um, you know, all of these things

Speaker 2: (10:51)
That

Speaker 1: (10:52)
Can really slow us down, install our business and distract us from the work that we're really here to do.

Speaker 2: (11:01)
So

Speaker 1: (11:01)
Acknowledging when those thoughts are coming up and saying, okay, right now I'm holding off on this because of this fearful thought, right? That's the first thing. And then we start to decide, okay, is this a belief that I want to carry? Is it true that I can't do this thing that I want to do that I desire to do until blank, blank, blank. No, that's not true. So it's catching ourselves and then shifting to what we want, what we desire to believe and what thought we're going to replace. And it takes practice to work on our mental. Right. And so my suggestion, so the types of things that I do for this, um, I meditate, I do visualization practices. I do business meditations. Um, I actually create business meditations for members of the membership, the premier coaching center membership, and also for the members of the dualism business mastermind.

Speaker 1: (11:56)
Um, so doing that type of exercise and I create my own affirmations. So I have, I have an ongoing like list that I update probably at this point about once every month or two. Um, I keep it in a Google doc and I have my list of affirmations, of things that I'm calling in beliefs that I want to embody. And when it needs to be refreshed, I go into zoom like I'm in right now, recording audio. You can do it on any audio recording app or anything that are free even. Um, and I record myself speaking the thing, the thoughts that I want to embody, that I desire to bring about business life, anything, marriage, family, motherhood, you know, any, any part of your life that you want to bring in some new, um, version

Speaker 2: (12:40)
You record yourself speaking at.

Speaker 1: (12:43)
And for me at this point, my track is like 16 minutes long. So that's kind of a, it's kind of a tall order. Um, but I listened to my affirmation track every single morning. Uh, there are days that I don't get to it until later in the day, but I try to listen to it every single day. And so, because it's not a meditation, I can do it well because it's not the type of thing that you have to lay down and close your eyes. That's about like there are walking meditations, but this is a little different. This is affirmation. So I listen to these sometimes as soon as I wake up, like while I'm kind of sitting here with my coffee, sometimes I do it while I'm walking the dog or I've listened to them in the car. I've listened to them in the bath at night when I'm getting ready for bed, I've listened to them when I'm doing my makeup or getting ready for the day, there really are no rules. I think the key is to fill your mind with the thoughts that you want to become your reality, right? And shift those fearful shift out of that fearful thought as quickly as you can.

Speaker 2: (13:43)
You know,

Speaker 1: (13:48)
And then the fourth plane, the spiritual body, well, this is my belief. So my belief is that our missions were placed directly on us. Your mission was placed directly on you, God divine, the universe source, whatever you believe in has called on you

Speaker 2: (14:08)
And you to do this work.

Speaker 1: (14:11)
If you didn't know that five, 10 years ago, because I'll tell you like 10 years ago, I would have never, ever, ever, ever guessed that this is where I would be, but this is where I'm at, because this is what has been, this is what I've been called to do. And if you're listening, if you're quieting the mind and doing the things that we talked about, even that are related to the mental body, like the mindset work, but meditation, this kind of goes into the meditation too. If you're meditating, flipping the switch, listening inward,

Speaker 2: (14:40)
You'll hear it

Speaker 1: (14:41)
Here. You're calling. And it will start to become more and more clear over time. Now sometimes you'll literally hear it if you are Claire audient. Um, so this is not a lesson in the clairs, but it is, there are literally people who hear things, you know, from source. And I believe that is Claire audient. Um, or sometimes you'll just know. And I re when I say, you'll hear it I'd need, like, you might just know I'm somebody who gets this like knowing. Um, and so when I know know something, that's what I mean that I hear it because I know it.

Speaker 2: (15:19)
I think I actually,

Speaker 1: (15:19)
It's not, like I said, this was the fourth spiritual body was the third. The fourth is the emotional body. And so in your business, how your emotional body is stretched as a business owner is okay. So if you were paying attention a couple of weeks ago, I posted a social media about normalizing the emotional rollercoaster as an entrepreneur. And I've talked about this on the podcast as well in the past, but being a business owner is an emotional rollercoaster. It really is. And I think that sometimes going in, um, we just, we don't know what we don't know, and we can be super optimistic, super excited, cause it's exciting to start a business. Um, but it can be up and down sometimes, right? Like some days we're really feeling incredible and we have incredible days and things are opening up and things are happening and their shifts. And, you know, perhaps we bring on new clients and we have all these amazing discovery calls and we meet all these people. And then there's days that are just like, nah, you know, there's parts of it that aren't so fun. There's times that people don't pay something that they owe or there's times that people, um, copy your work or use it inappropriately. There's times that like really uncomfortable things happen.

Speaker 2: (16:28)
And I do think that

Speaker 1: (16:31)
That it's, it's not that we want to

Speaker 2: (16:37)
Ignore

Speaker 1: (16:38)
The bad emotions that we have about it, but to realize that it's normal to have the emotions. And I mean, if you really want to grow and expand in a deeper way to dig into what's underneath that emotion. So what emotion is coming out of what happened? So in my example, if somebody uses your work and appropriately, is there a negative emotion tied to it? Or is it just a thing that happened? That's not going to take up. It's not going to drive you all the way down on that roller coaster ride. It's just like, okay, this happened, this is normal. This is part of this. I can have some feelings about this and I can accept and acknowledge that this is part of business and how do I want to proceed?

Speaker 2: (17:21)
And one of the things that

Speaker 1: (17:23)
Many of my clients in the membership, when we have our monthly live stream Q and A's, um, that they bring up, they post in the peer support community all the time is about these ups and downs. Like I think many of us, especially, especially in the last 11 ish months, didn't realize

Speaker 2: (17:39)
That being a business

Speaker 1: (17:41)
Owner can be very isolating. You know, when you run your own ship, it can feel like you're all alone. And so we wonder like, does everybody feel like this is this just me? I'm the only one who feels like this. I'm the only one who's sad. I'm the only one who has this up and down road. But I think that there's some comfort in that we're realizing that this is actually normal. This is part of it. And other business owners feel like this too. I'm raising my hand. You can't see it, but I'm raising my hand because I do it too. You know, I've learned how to handle, how to process the emotions and how to expand. When I write, recognize that I'm having a weird emotional charge from something, how I can handle it in such a way that it allows me to expand and turn it into, there's a coach that I follow that I've actually taken a bunch of her courses.

Speaker 1: (18:28)
And the way she describes that is into gold. And so like turning into gold, right? So I think realizing that that's normal, it's just part of it. And all that's to say, right? That this doesn't mean that being a business owner is all stress or that being an entrepreneur means that you have to be hard. Part of the hustle crew, like hustle, hustle, hustle. You have to get up at three o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning and you have to do this and you have to do that. And you have to burn the midnight oil and you have to stay up all night after that the kids go to bed. No, that's not how I'm suggesting to do things. And that's totally not what this episode is about. Um, or that it's not worth it. I'm sharing this. All of all, I'm sharing this whole episode, really.

Speaker 1: (19:12)
And I'm putting all this episode together to say that birthing your business, baby is hard. It can be really challenging and you can do hard things. Just like we tell people when they're prepping for birth, birth can be hard. It's a mess. You know, like it's a whole thing. It's the four planes. It's everything. It's a transformation. Entrepreneurship is a transformation. It's just that we weren't really led to believe. We didn't learn that. I didn't learn that I went to business school and I didn't learn that. I learned that when you want to start a business, you create a business plan. Um, that's so arbitrary and you go to a bank and you get a business loan and you hire people and then you move forward. And like, there's no emotion involved with it. Nobody in business school, I went to university of South Florida.

Speaker 1: (19:59)
I graduated with a degree in finance and a minor in accounting. And nobody ever talked to me about the emotional stuff and all of these other pieces about business and being a business owner. But man, they are true. I'm a few years in and it's all true and we can do it. And it's important and it's worth it. Holy crap. Is it worth it because it's not always going to look the way that it looks today. The things you're doing right now, the things that sometimes feel so hard. Like I mentioned earlier, staying up long after the kids go to bed to create your curriculum. It's not always like that. I'm not a fan of staying up and I don't do it at all anymore. I've only done it a couple of times. I'm not a night person though. I do get up early in the morning.

Speaker 1: (20:37)
Cause I like it. Um, but if you're a night person that might be part of your thing, but you might not always do that. Like once I made the curriculum, it was done. I didn't have to do that again. Right. And once do a lot of these hard things, especially in the beginning, you might not be doing those things anymore a year in two years, in three years in. So how can you, how can you really navigate this and embrace and expand, knowing what we've covered everything today, right? How can you really integrate this into your business and into your life in a way that helps you to expand? Think about it like this when you're building, when you advise clients, your pregnant clients to put together their birth support team, right? You're suggesting that they have a specialist. They have, you know, or provider, maybe not a specialist, but they have a provider.

Speaker 1: (21:26)
They have a doula, they have somebody that's teaching them childbirth education. So if they have tools, right? So let's think about it like this. They have tools with just birth classes or parenting classes or, um, postpartum class or babywearing class. They're taking classes, that's giving them tools, right? And then they need support. So they go to the next step and they hire doula support virtual or in-person. And they also have a provider that's giving them support, right? So they're building this birth support team. Why? Because they don't have to do it themselves by themselves. It's hard. They can do hard things and they don't have to do them by themselves. It's the same. When you're building your business, you need a business support team. This is challenging and you can do hard things and you don't have to do it by yourself. Right? And so that's very much the, the mindset behind how I built my business to support other doulas is I have tools.

Speaker 1: (22:20)
I have courses, classes, modules, tutorials, checklists, um, the digital doula content toolkit. I have samples, templates, all of these tools that I've bundled into the premier coaching center membership that gives you support and community so that you're surrounded by people who get it, who are holding you up when you're like, Holy crap, this is hard. I'm on the, I'm on the drop part of the rollercoaster. They hold you up because they've had those days too. And then when you're at the peak and you're flying high, you're at the top, they're cheering you on there too. So you've got all of that. And my support too, because we have our monthly live streams and I moderate the peer support group. So for the next year, you're setting yourself up to have a team. Even if you can't necessarily hire a VA right now, or you can't necessarily hire, um, a podcast editor or whatever, right.

Speaker 1: (23:11)
That's not, if you're not there, that's okay. This by far, in my opinion, especially if you're newish to your business is where you will get the most con the biggest combination and the strongest combination of tools, support, and the peer community, the circle aspect, um, as you build your business for the next year. All right, guys. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I look forward to hearing everything that you guys think about it on the social medias, and I hope you have a great day and an even better week. I'll see you guys soon.