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How to Get Your Business Ready for Summer

How to Get Your Business Ready for Summer

by | Aug 4, 2025 | Business model

How to Get Your Business Ready for Summer

How to Get Your Business Ready for Summer (Without Burning Out or Dropping Balls)

With summer upon is, it’s time to get your business ready for what is likely to be a different pace. Let’s face it, summer has a habit of impacting what’s possible in our day to day working life and as such, it might be time to embrace a different rhythm.

Why Summer Deserves a Different Rhythm

There are several reasons you might operate on a different rhythm during the Summer months.

  • Kids on Summer break.
  • Summer holidays planned.
  • The desire to spend more time outdoors and less time on the computer.
  • More socialising because that’s what sunshine does to people!
  • Friends and family visiting (when you live in Spain, this is a big one!).
  • Less sign ups and clients during the summer months because they too are dealing with much of the above.

The impact all of this can have on our focus, our motivation and our bottom line is undeniable.

Yet so many of us head into Summer with all of the same expectations of ourselves and our businesses, only to be sorely disappointed when we inevitably get derailed by the Summer months.

What do you want and need from Summer?

I don’t know about you but I kinda want it all. Steady income AND lots of time and space to enjoy the sunshine with my family. But if push comes to shove, I know I’d rather take a hit to the bottom line, to allow me to enjoy the Summer with my boys.

How about you? What are your priorities for the coming Summer months? Will you be travelling? Have children home from school? Be out socialising more?

Take a moment now to really tune into what you want and need from Summer and give yourself full permission to define Summer on your own terms.

I’ve built a business model that brings in revenue all year round via group programs and 1:1 subscriptions but I know that often applications for 1:1 coaching drop in the Summer and some clients even put pause on our work until Autumn/Fall.

To some extent, I’m okay with this as it gives me the flexibility to finish my days early and hang with my boys and also to do things I can’t do when work is really busy. I have a couple of big launches coming up later in the year, so the spaces I see in July and August feel super helpful to me to prepare for those launches.

Having said that, I’m all about brainstorming some easeful ways to top up my income so that I can have a fun-filled Summer and not have to pay too dearly for it.

Anticipating and preparing for seasonal shifts

I’ve learnt over the years that certain shifts are to be expected when Summer hits and here is how I’m preparing for them.

1. People don’t want to make big commitments in the Summer

Given a lot of people are on holidays or wanting to spend less time in Zoom calls, it’s inevitable that I get less 1:1 coaching applications during the summer months and a lot of existing clients like to put pause on our work and restart later in the year.

That combined with my own holidays and I do typically see a drop in income in August particularly. This year, I’ve been brainstorming some summer friendly offers to offset the drop in income from my 1:1 coaching subscription with some offers that (hopefully) people will be more inclined to invest in.

2. I feel less inspired and have less time to create content

With a downtick in client sessions, I usually have less in the moment inspiration to guide my content creation during the Summer. Normally I write what feels present to me in the moment, based on what is coming up in client and group program calls. But for the next few months, I’ll take some time now to plan topics ahead of time so that I don’t have to think too much about it over the Summer.

I’ll also identify a few pieces of content that could be easily repurposed into newsletters should I not manage to get my content created each week.

And if I’m feeling really on top of things I might try and batch create a few pieces that can be scheduled for times when I can’t write, like when I’m on my 2-week holiday in August.

3. I have more space in my calendar than usual

Even though I typically work fewer hours in the Summer because I want to make the most of my time with my boys, even within the hours I do work, there’s typically more space in my calendar than during the Spring, Autumn, and Winter seasons.

Rather than waste this opportunity, I’m starting to plan now for the activities I want to work on, that I typically don’t have time to work on when I’m busier. Here are just some of the things I am considering/planning to do:

  • Working on my new website (I don’t have an official launch date yet but I do have a brand new brand and website in the works!)
  • Working on my message and web copy for the new website.
  • Working on implementing better SEO on the more than 200 articles I have written.
  • Working on growing my list with some new generous freebies.

I doubt I’ll have time to do all of these things but in being really intentional about planning my down-time, I am now really clear on what time I have left over for some of these business growth activities.

Managing expectations

With change afoot managing expectations is a must. Not just your expectations of yourself but your clients expectations.

Here’s what I do on that front:

In terms of my expectations, by doing the thinking now about what I want from Summer and what I can reasonably manage in the time available to me, I’m aware that certain things might not get done as quickly as usual or at all and I’m good with that.

In terms of clients, I’m always upfront with clients about when I’m on holiday and my boundaries around that. I’m a firm believer in working when I’m working and being off when I’m off so you won’t ever hear me say that I’ll try and answer emails while I’m away. Before holidays, I send a note to my clients to let them know I’ll be away and unresponsive to email and I put my autoresponder on.

As a business coach, I want to model what it looks like to run a spacious, sustainable business implementing strong boundaries and protecting your down time at all costs!

What’s on your list?

Now that I’ve shared with you how I am preparing for the Summer, I’d like to invite you to take some time to consider the following questions:

  1. What do you want and need from your Summer?
  2. What seasonal shifts do you anticipate in your business this Summer?
  3. Is there anything you need to do to better prepare for those shifts?
  4. Is there anything you want to do less of or more of during Summer?
  5. What can you prep or automate now to take the burden off later?
  6. What boundaries will you put in place with your clients?

I’d love to invite you to take just one simple action to prepare your business for Summer this week. Feel free to let me know what it is in the comments.

 

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

Why I Don’t Recommend Tiered Pricing

Why I Don’t Recommend Tiered Pricing

by | Jul 23, 2025 | Selling, Uncategorized

Why I Don’t Recommend Tiered Pricing

Why I Don’t Recommend Tiered Pricing

Given that I work with business owners who want to operate with integrity and do right by their clients and customers, accessible pricing options such as Pay What You Can (PWYC) and tiered pricing often come up in my 1:1 and group program calls. More often than not, people are surprised when I share that I don’t recommend them.

In case you haven’t heard these terms before, Pay What You Can allows your customers to choose a price that feels affordable to them and tiered pricing offers several different prices for the same or similar offering, inviting the customer to choose the price they can best afford.

If you’ve ever considered PWYC or tiered pricing, I totally get it. Having a single price point that might exclude some people from accessing our offerings can feel uncomfortable for the conscious business owner who wants to help as many people as possible.

Couple that with how tricky pricing our offerings can feel, because we worry that we might pick a price people can’t afford or one that equates to undercharging, and it’s no wonder then that many people see these multi-price options as a potential win-win.

My perspective is a bit different, and here’s why

The hidden costs of PWYC

I first encountered PWYC pricing years ago when I was trying to access some business trainings from Mark Silver’s Heart of Business. I’ll be honest I found it stressful.

Whilst he goes to great lengths to describe how to make your decision and even gives a baseline amount, I remember not knowing which option to choose and feeling too guilty to choose the baseline but not really being able to afford more and so, on more than one occasion, I ended up not buying at all.

You can see how he presents it here. As you notice, there is a significant amount of information on making the payment decision that I feel makes the whole process more fraught for the buyer. Just to note I love Mark and his work so this isn’t me knocking him at all. In fact when clients are set on doing PWYC, I’ll often send them to the Heart of Business website as the best example of PWYC pricing I’ve seen.

Most people don’t give even half as much information as he does, so making the decision can feel even harder.

My feeling is that for the consumer PWYC pricing can create unnecessary stress around making a decision and can have you wondering throughout, should I have chosen the lower price? It may even mean losing sales if people can’t decide easily and plan to come back to your sales page but inevitably never do.

For the business owner, it can mean constantly navigating who pays what, making it hard to keep track or to predict income. It may mean more admin or questions from potential customers unsure about what price to choose.

And, when more people inevitably choose to pay less, there’s a chance of resentment and wondering if people should or could be paying more.

It’s for these reasons I’ve chosen not to use it myself.

The pitfalls of tiered pricing

Other ways I’ve seen pricing offered is with several tiers, sometimes based around affordability and other times based on what is offered.

Here’s a simple example of what tiered pricing could look like for a course/program.

Tier 1 — might be just the materials/videos for 199$
Tier 2 — might be the materials/video + live group calls for 399$
and — Tier 3 might be materials/videos + group calls + 1:1 sessions for 799$.

Here’s where we might see names like Basic package or VIP package thrown around.

For me the issues with this kind of pricing are as follows:

  • It’s unnecessarily complicated — too many options can lead to overwhelmed and indecisive customers.
  • It can lead to a fear of missing out (FOMO) if you simply can’t afford the higher tier. This creates an unintended hierarchy, in that people feel like they are getting a “lesser” version, which could impact engagement and outcomes.
  • It can undermine your work especially if your work is deeply transformational or relational — not something that fits neatly into silver/gold/platinum boxes.

When I tried using tiered pricing in the past, I noticed that people nearly always went for the cheapest option, even when I knew one of the other options would be more impactful.

That’s why these days you won’t see different tiers for my offers.

There is only ever one option (the one I think serves the customer and myself best) and one price (the price I need to charge to have my business be sustainable).

So what’s the alternative?

Now you might be thinking, but what if people can’t afford that price?

I get it, I think about this all the time.

One way I recommend to clients who really do want to offer a cheaper option for people who can’t afford it, is to include a line on the sales page underneath the price that says something like.

If the price of this <insert offer> is prohibitive, please note that I offer a number of discounted (or scholarship) spots for people with limited means. Please email me at <insert email address> for details.

That way, those people who really can’t afford it have an option available to them. You could give more detail here, but I am a “less is more” kind of girl when it comes to sales pages.

What I do

What I do to ensure accessible pricing is to choose the best price I can offer without sacrificing my own needs. There’s no doubt I could charge more than I do and could be earning more as a result.

Instead, I try to keep my prices as accessible as possible. That said there will always be people who can’t afford, for example, my 1:1 subscription, but rather than offer my most premium service for less money, I try to offer more affordable alternatives, options such as workshops or group programs.

That way there are always cheaper ways to work with me, without me devaluing my higher touch services, like 1:1 coaching. As someone who leans towards undercharging and overgiving, this is progress for me!

Interestingly, the people who come to me with a desire to offer cheaper options to their people are often the business owners who are themselves struggling to make their business work for them financially.

I’m curious, have you tried PWYC or tiered pricing? Is it working? Does it feel sustainable? If you feel called to share your experience, please do hit reply and let me know.

If you’ve been wrestling with how to make your pricing accessible without burning out, I hope this gives you some reassurance and direction. It’s okay to keep things simple. It’s okay to have one clear price. And it’s more than okay to create boundaries that support your sustainability and service. There are thoughtful ways to make your services accessible without compromising your needs.

 

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

The Path to Mastery: Why Embarrassment Is the Entry Fee

The Path to Mastery: Why Embarrassment Is the Entry Fee

by | Jul 14, 2025 | Mindset, Uncategorized

The Path to Mastery: Why Embarrassment Is the Entry Fee

The Path to Mastery: Why Embarrassment Is the Entry Fee

I came across the following quote a few months ago and it stopped me in my tracks. It perfectly captures what the path to mastery really looks like:

“Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren’t willing to look like a foolish beginner, you’ll never become a graceful master.”

~ Ed Latimore

I wholeheartedly agree with this and what I love so much about this quote is the link it makes between feeling like a foolish beginner and achieving a level of mastery. It got me thinking about what I have achieved over the last decade of running my own business and where I started the journey.

I still remember the excruciating fear of my first coaching session, my first group call, hitting publish on my first blog post and the first time I reached out to a stranger on the internet. Now I can tap back into the feelings of anxiety and self-doubt like it was yesterday.

I’ve been surprised numerous times over the years by just how terrifying being in business can feel at times but thankfully, I haven’t let it deter me from moving forward. I now find myself comfortably on the other side of many of those initial fears. Reading the quote above brought into sharp focus the link between facing those initial fears and the path to mastery at what we do.

The Myth of Mastery

Mastery is so often grossly misunderstood. More often than not, we look at someone who has achieved a level of mastery in a skill or profession and incorrectly assume that they’ve always been accomplished in this area. We assume they must possess some innate brilliance that we simply don’t.

That’s how I used to feel anyway.

And then someone told me what a gifted group facilitator they thought I was, which immediately transported me back to my very first group call. A Women’s Circle I decided to host, right at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I was absolutely terrified, consumed with fear of failure and concerns over what the women on the call would think about me, but somehow, with a wobbly voice and shaking hands, I managed to pull it off.

I have no idea how I came across on that very first call — I’m certain my nerves showed — and I’m pretty sure that nobody would have referred to me as a gifted facilitator. More like a rabbit in the headlights.

Since that point I’ve hosted hundreds of live group calls. I’ve stumbled my way through tricky group dynamics, had more than a few difficult conversations with individual group members about their impact on the group and received a ton of feedback on my group facilitation skills that has helped me to improve and feel more confident. But it hasn’t been a straight line.

The Messy Middle

A while ago, I was feeling called to pull the plug on my yearlong group mastermind. I had stopped enjoying it and was feeling the call to do something else. So I sought out a coach to help me figure things out and as I talked about the group program, he said the following: “Sounds to me like you’re coming up against the edges of your leadership skills.” He went on to say that the problem wasn’t likely the program itself but my need to level up my skills at leading it.

It really hit home. I took what he had said to heart and I worked hard to improve my facilitation skills, not shying away when a situation required me to step up as the leader, no matter how uncomfortable I felt.

Since then my group program has only grown and I love it more than I ever have. Plus I feel confident about my skills and my ability to face any situation that might arise. Getting to this place with group facilitation has taken over a decade. It wasn’t something I was naturally gifted at nor particularly skilled at but it is something I’ve persevered with and managed to clock up hundreds of hours of practice at.

It would have been so easy for me not to push myself at working with groups. To let one bad experience derail my self-belief. The hard work has been pushing through that discomfort. I firmly believe that mastery is a relationship with discomfort, repetition, and showing up even when it’s messy.

What the Path to Mastery Looks Like

For me the journey to mastery goes through 4 stages:

1. The initial attempt. This is often the hardest thing to do. It’s the first time you’re trying something new. Perhaps it’s your first launch, your first video, your first group call. Whatever it is, it’s not something you’ve been able to practice and perfect so the vulnerability stakes are high. If we can get past our fear of looking foolish, this first milestone is huge.

2. Repeated practice. This is where we take that first attempt and we keep going. I’ve heard from so many business owners when discussing business strategies the following words: “I tried to do that and it didn’t work” which they present as justification for not trying again. Many of my first attempts at things have felt like failures (as a perfectionist that’s pretty much a given) but over time and with practice I’ve turned those initial “failures” into successes. You can only do that with repeated practice.

3. The messy middle. Sometimes when we’ve been practicing for a while, things come up that test our abilities, much like what happened with my group mastermind. I could feel comfortable and okay as long as I didn’t have to deal with anything too tricky. When things got challenging, the desire to bail got strong but leaning into my discomfort at these times is what has kept me on the path.

4. A level of mastery. This is where you’ve gone through the 3 stages and survived to tell the tale. People look at you and consider you gifted or skilled (and probably underestimating all the effort you’ve put in over the years). This is where the phrase “you make it look easy” comes into play. Not because it is easy but because you’ve done the work to make it look easy.

Every stage has its unique challenges. Your only goal, if mastery is what you are seeking, is to stay the course and keep showing up.

Why It’s Particularly Difficult for Business Owners

What makes the path to mastery so difficult for us is the fact that we are making the journey publicly. It’s not like learning to play the guitar, where you can go through the stages of mastery behind closed doors, in the comfort of your own bedroom.

For us, more often than not, the path to mastery requires us to face our fears and lean into vulnerability in front of an audience filled with prospective clients, peers and possibly mentors. And that is not easy.

It’s probably no secret by now that being an entrepreneur requires courage and determination. Not, as we often think, skills or confidence. They come later with time. The courage to take the first step and the determination to keep showing up? That’s what’s needed.

And now a question for you to contemplate:

Where are you holding back in business because you’re afraid of looking foolish?

And once you’ve identified that,

What first step would you be willing to take in the next week or two?

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to skip being a beginner. But rather than see that as a flaw, what if we viewed it as a rite of passage on the journey to mastery?

And when you are worried what people might think, remember most people are too busy worrying about not looking foolish themselves to really pay any attention to what you are doing.

If this post has inspired you to make a first step, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

 

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

8 Ways To Grow Your Audience

8 Ways To Grow Your Audience

by | Jan 24, 2024 | Audience Growth

“So much easier to aim for the smallest possible audience, not the largest, to build long-term value among a trusted, delighted tribe, to create work that matters and stands the test of time.”
~ Seth Godin

The cold hard truth is that you can’t succeed in business if people don’t know you exist.

A group of people who not only know you exist but who are interested in you and your work is what I call your business audience.

These are the people who follow you on social, the people subscribed to your newsletter, the people in your network, who you have some sort of business-related connection with. Essentially they are the people who are listening to what you have to say and are on some level interested in what you are selling.

Without an audience to sell to. It’s hard to build a thriving and sustainable business. It’s hard to get clients, fill programs and workshops, grow your list and create passive income.

Now I’m not saying you can’t succeed in business without 10,000 followers on Instagram or at least 2000 subscribers on your email list. I’m doing pretty well myself without either of those! But you do need people to sell to or your marketing efforts and launches will feel like shouting into the abyss.

If you’re feeling like one of the best kept secrets in your industry, I highly recommend spending time working on some or all of the following. many of the links below take you to further reading, so if you are serious about taking action on these strategies, feel free to go a bit deeper by clicking the links.

1. Content Marketing

I know, I know, everyone and their dog has probably told you how important it is to create content for your business and unless content creation comes naturally to you, it can feel like a real drag. However, it’s undoubtedly one of the best ways i know to grow and nurture your audience.

Two things are important here.

Firstly, you need a content marketing system. It’s no good creating content without a clear strategy or some intention behind what you create. I teach a create — repurpose — promote model, which moves you away from spending hours on one blog post only to post it, get a handful of views, for it never to be seen again.

No wonder content creation feels hard when we put in all that effort for little return. It’s not enough to create your content and share it once, you must make the most of everything you create and do your best to make it as visible as possible.

Secondly, if you struggle with content, it might be because of how you are thinking about it.

When we create content with the sole purpose of getting the sale or enticing people to buy from us, it takes all of the creativity and joy out of it for us (as well as the recipient of our content!). Reframing how you think about marketing is a must here. Focusing on how our content can serve our audience, feels much better to create and is in my opinion much more effective at resulting in a sale.

2. Authentic Outreach

If you’ve spent any time in my world at all you’ve likely heard me talk about authentic outreach. The art of reaching out to individual members of your network with the dual purpose of connecting and serving.

It might seem odd to recommend a 1:1 strategy for audience growth, but once your network is activated, you’ll have other people sending people your way on the regular. Besides 1:1 outreach is what can lead to a plethora of other audience building activities like being invited onto podcasts or guest teaching.

I recently did an interview with Sarah Santacroce on this very topic so if you want to go deeper, you can watch that here.

3. Market Research

I’m a huge fan of doing market research and I typically recommend that my clients do this by running what I call a market research campaign. This is where we pull together an invitation that describes our ideal client and the problem that we help solve for them (our niche!) and then invite those very people into conversation with us.

In that conversation you then ask them important questions about their struggle and what they need from a service provider like you and in return, if you want to, you can offer the person some guidance or help. I like to offer 60 minute calls and spend 30 minutes on research and 30 minutes on serving.

The great thing about these is that you can share the invitation far and wide, in relevant groups on social media and with your network, asking that they share it with anyone who fits the bill. As you’re not selling anything, people are much more willing to share and participate and in doing so, many more people get to know what it is you do in the world and who you serve.

4. Paid promotions

This is the third prong of my content marketing strategy and is the best way I know to get my content and, therefore, my business in front of new people. The key here is to stop using ads to sell your products and services to a cold audience and instead pay to promote your free, valuable content first to your warm audience and then to a cool audience. Warm being those who already follow you on social and visit your website and cool being people you’ve identified as possible clients based on interests and demographics.

In my business, for example, every week I spent 5–10 euros paying to promote Facebook text posts (repurposed content from old newsletters just like this one!) to my warm audience first and then to people who I have identified as likely to have an online business. It’s not a ton of ad spend but it definitely ensures more people see my stuff.

Serving rather than selling with my ads is how I’ve grown an engaged and loyal audience.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There’s so much more to say about SEO than I could possibly share here but if you already have a substantial backlog of content/blog posts on your website, but you’re not getting the traffic you need to impact your bottom line, it may well be worth looking into SEO.

I got serious about SEO when I started to get clients from a blog post I wrote years ago. Turns out people were searching for alternatives to discovery calls and my blog post about gift sessions was ranking on the first page for “discovery calls alternative”. If I can accidentally get clients via Google from a blog post, imagine what can be done if you are actually intentional about SEO!

Inspired by my accidental success, this year I took part in a 4 month SEO intensive program and although I did learn a lot of the more technical stuff, the biggest aha I had was to really take into account the topics and questions my ideal clients might be searching for online and integrating those into my website copy and content. Writing my titles and content in such a way that it answers those search queries has been huge for me.

If you’ve yet to get serious about content, you can skip SEO for now and come back to it when you have content worth optimizing. And if you are keen to learn more, check out Love at First Search for lots of great articles and free resources on SEO.

6. Collaborations

This is one of my all time favourites, which makes me smile because just a few years ago, the word collaboration made me cringe. I’ve always been a “go it alone” type but in recent years, collaborating in my business has been fun, rewarding and financially fruitful.

Collaborations can come in many forms but one of my favourites has been guest teaching for other people’s audiences. I’ve taught classes for free to many of my colleague’s audiences and as a result have always got more subscribers, applications to work together and sales.

I’ve been around the block long enough to be invited into some places where large numbers of my ideal clients are hanging out (places like Tad Hargrave’s membership) but years ago, when nobody knew I existed, I was the one going out and creating those connections, interviewing people, inviting people to teach to my audience and generally doing what I could to support my colleagues.

All of these helped to grow my audience and visibility and now I’m often the recipient of the invitation rather than the other way around!

7. Gift session campaigns

Gift session campaigns are one of my favourite strategies for getting you and your business in direct contact with your ideal clients. Time and time again, my clients report back to me that they have signed up new clients as a result of a gift session campaign they’re running.

Similar to Market Research Campaigns, the idea is to create an invitation that speaks to a specific problem and your specific ideal client, which you then promote and share far and wide, then watch as people who fit your ideal client description start to sign up for gift sessions with you. There’s no selling here, but when done well, you can get subscribers, testimonials, referrals and of course new clients.

8. Generous freebies

Traditional online marketing advice will tell you that the best way to grow your audience is to offer a free opt-in to your newsletter. Typically this is a pithy, PDF with something along the lines of the “5 Top Tips to XXX”. I believe that people got tired of this sort of opt-in years ago. It’s also much more common these days for people to sign up for a newsletter just to get the freebie only to unsubscribe straight afterwards. That’s why I usually recommend that my clients do something else.

This is what I call the generous freebie. Freebies that are actually worth sticking around for, demonstrate expertise and build trust and deepen relationships. Gift sessions are an example of this, as our other mini services you can provide like website or copy reviews or free classes or workshops. Others might include a free 5–7 day challenge — one that offers real value.

An innovative freebie I love is Lauren Van Mullem’s Craft and Copy sessions, where you go and do crafts with Lauren (online), whilst getting the chance to ask her anything about your website copy.

So there you have it, 8 of my favourite audience growth strategies, all of which are designed not only to add numbers to your list but to build meaningful relationships with your ideal clients.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

My Word Of The Year (+ The Story Behind It)

My Word Of The Year (+ The Story Behind It)

by | Dec 21, 2022 | Mindset

“When we stop growing, we stop living and start existing.”
~ Warren Wiersbe

This blog is a bit different, in that I’m not here to share a business strategy with you, more the personal story behind the word I’ve chosen as my theme for next year. 

My personal growth journey started back in 2010. I was in the middle of a nasty and toxic break-up, my self-esteem was rock-bottom and in a moment where I realised I needed help, I booked an appointment with a therapist. And thus my healing journey began. Those first few years were huge, I became celibate and sober, I started a blog, I quit my career, I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand. From there, I travelled, did hours and hours and hours of yoga, tried out various healing modalities, attended meditation retreats, found myself, learned to love myself and as a result met the love of my life.

From there we travelled some more, I built a business as a coach, lived off the grid in a remote village in Mexico for a year and finally returned to Europe to start a family. From 2016, I navigated the adventures of pregnancy, motherhood, and moving house, all while launching and growing my second business.

It’s safe to say that my personal and professional growth journey, during the decade 2010–2020, was truly epic.

And then something else happened. In 2018 after experiencing some level of burn-out (characterised by sheer exhaustion and chronic bouts of illness), I hit the reset button. I became all about doing less and finding ease. So much so that my word of the year for the past two years has been ease. But it hasn’t been easy, at the end of 2019, I gave birth to my second son, just as my business was booming, and there I was navigating being a mother to two boys while single-handedly managing a thriving business. It’s been a slog.

And somewhere along the line, I feel as though I stopped growing and simply started existing.

A few days ago, I was unpacking boxes of books in my office and came across a box FULL of personal journals and notebooks from years gone by. I was blown away by what those notebooks contained. In my words, there was so much awe and wonder at the limitless possibilities there are available to us at any moment.

As I read them I couldn’t decide if my younger self was naive or my current self, jaded. After sleeping on it, I came down on the side of the latter. I realise that with the busyness of being a parent and a business owner, I’ve lost my connection to my own sense of personal (and even professional) growth.

Given the huge leaps I made in that decade of growth, it’s almost as if somewhere inside of me, I had started to believe that I had reached my limit. Having hit so many of personal and professional goals, it’s like I had unconsciously told myself, well that’s it, job done, now you just have to maintain it. 

I know that part of this plateau has been complacency, especially in my business. After years of struggling in the feast and famine stage and then finally having my business take off, there has undoubtedly been a trend of sticking with what I know works, to stop experimenting so much and thus take my eyes off learning new strategies.

On a personal level, another part of this has been hitting middle age. As a 45 year old woman, who has had two children late in life, there has been, for me, a gnawing sense that my best years are behind me. That my levels of fitness, capacity for adventure and ability to stretch myself have already hit their peak.

When I caught this limiting belief recently, it was like a siren sounding. Since then it’s felt like a spark has been ignited once again. I’ve come to realise that over the past couple of years I have stopped growing, stopped learning, stopped having breakthroughs and insights, stopped having my mind blown by new ideas. I realise now that there’s been an unconscious script playing in the background that’s been telling me I’ve done all the growing I’m going to do.

What a load of BS!

And that is why my word of the year for 2023 is growth.

G-R-O-W-T-H

It’s time for me to break out of the personal and professional plateau I’ve been on for some time now and re-engage my beginner’s mind. To allow myself to believe that new heights are possible in all areas of my life. I feel tentative and excited in equal measure. I want 2023 to be a year that I learn new things and grow in new ways. I want to ditch the feeling that I’ve peaked already, that the only way left is to stay the same (or slowly decline). I truly believe that there are new heights to be experienced, if I’m only willing to believe in the possibilities.

And that’s why I am sharing this with you here. For my sake — to speak out loud the story I’ve been telling myself and to put in black and white my intention for the year ahead.

And for you — in case you too are harbouring limiting beliefs about what’s possible for you in 2023. I’m excited for you to consider what could unfold for you, if you were willing to believe in the possibilities?

Have you set your word of the year for 2023? If so, I’d love to know what it is. Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

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