When you let fear overpower you, you stop living. Use that fear instead and choose to live a brave life. In this episode, Dolores Hirschmann sits down for a discussion on bravery and fear with leadership coach Heather Vickery. Dolores talks about why people let fear overpower them and what you can do to choose bravery every day. Listen and be inspired by Heather’s message and learn more about being brave.
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Choose To Live A Brave Life With Heather Vickery
I met Heather in 2019 at an event with Ali Brown and I really loved her from the first moment. She is so passionate about the work that she does for helping people become brave but not from a place of seeking bravery but from a place of understanding what they’re afraid of and leveraging that understanding to conquer their fears in some way, to overcome their fears and become brave. Don’t miss this episode with Heather because I know it’s going to be packed with amazing insights and ideas on how to live that brave life.
I had an amazing time with Heather. I hadn’t seen her for about a year but she’s doing such amazing work in her business. She’s launching her first book. She is growing her team and she’s tapping into her ideal clients, which are business owners, entrepreneurs and helping them understand their fears so they can journey in the path of becoming and being brave. Her story is inspiring. She has a great methodology with the word brave and I think you would love some of the tips and insights she shares in our episode together. Don’t miss it.
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Heather, it’s so good to see you again. I feel like we hugged each other for the first and only time in 2019 at Ali Brown’s event and then we’ve talked a few times and we’ve seen each other on Zoom. How have you been?
Those were the days back when we could go. I’m starting to go out and do things in person again but thoughtfully and slowly, good. 2020 was strangely a really difficult year but a great growth year for my business. I don’t know about you but for me, whenever I think of something that happened “last year”, I’m always talking about 2019. 2020 was like the missing year.
It is funny that it’s such a milestone year. 2020, there are movies around it and that it was such strange because it was good for some, not so good for some others but it was definitely atypical. Let’s jump in to tell us about you and I was asked the clarity journey and it’s like “the clarity journey” because people on the outside feel that we have all our lives, for lack of a better word, together. How did you get to now in your work?
I don’t know if it’s a simple question for anyone. Much of my life and my work at this moment in time stems from making the personal decision to essentially burn my life to the ground and rebuild it. I came out of the closet after a decade of marriage. I got a divorce. I closed a thriving, successful, luxury event planning business that I’d had for eighteen years and pivoted into speaking, training, coaching and writing, which are all things I’ve been doing as part of my event business but I completely closed that element.
We can’t have clarity without reassessment, reflection, and resilience.
Clarity is such an interesting word choice. We can’t have clarity without what I call the three R’s, which are reassessment, reflection and resilience. It’s part of my BRAVE Method. It wasn’t until I started thoughtfully and intentionally doing that reflection, reframing the moments in my life, how do I want to feel, who do I want to be and then getting up and doing it again but on my terms that I had any clarity. I think I was going down the path that was set in front of me. I wasn’t an entrepreneur. Maybe that’s the only thing I did that was bucking the normal tradition.
I realized very quickly out of college that while I worked well with people, I didn’t work well for people and I didn’t want to and I didn’t. I did a little for a couple of years and then I started my own business. Even then, this is where our stories are somewhat similar, yours and mine. We talked about this when you were on The Brave Files Podcast, which is my show. My business, while I was married, was very part-time. It was successful. It was really successful but I wasn’t working 40, 50 hours a week. I wasn’t providing for my family doing that.
All of a sudden, I got a divorce and because I was the one who wanted the divorce for all the reasons, for better, for worse, I said no to alimony. There’s child support but no alimony. All of a sudden, my business needed to provide for my family just like your situation and it did. People want me to tell them how and I’m like, “I don’t know how.”
There’s some how’s. In any business owner, when you have to scale fast, there is that clarity on non-negotiable, «This is what I do for people,» and you communicate that powerfully. In non-negotiable, you have some systems you start to delegate and you stop the creative mind of the curse of the entrepreneur, which is good but it’s hard and for a little bit, you say, “I’m not going to create a new course. I’m going to sell more of what I have.” You have a more of rinse and repeat systematized way. Otherwise, there’s no way you can survive.
You’re right about that. Of course, there are systems but I will say that it was at that time that I transitioned from one business to the other. I was building, I was creating new things and I was learning to do things that not only did I not know how to do, I never imagined myself doing. I was learning, creating, serving all at the same time.
When I say I don’t know how, emotionally and physically I don’t really know how. We just do. You clarify what you want, you create a plan, you start and it changes. It’s changed so much in the course of the last several years. The journey has been fascinating and sometimes it felt great and sometimes it felt awful but I never doubted that it was the right journey and the right path.
Let’s talk about this. What is your work? What do you do and for whom?
Brave Life: The world deserves you to play big. You get to take up space. You get to be honest and authentic and vulnerable, and make this work for you.
I am a success and leadership coach. I specifically support mostly entrepreneurs but I do work with some corporate clients as well. This is what sets me apart from a lot of coaches and I have a lot of coaches and I love a lot of coaches. I work with people to identify what they’re afraid of, to understand their fears, to leverage those fears once they have the knowledge and to use them to create intentional bravery.
Brave is really my business. Everything that I do is surrounded by this concept of choosing bravely. When we choose bravely on purpose, I have discovered both for myself and for all of my clients, we start to choose bigger things. When we recognize our choices are brave, we get a little gutsier. We have bigger wins and bigger payoffs and my favorite part is it’s absolutely contagious to the people around us.
Here’s what I love about your succinctness and clarity in this episode and it’s that a lot of people will say to me, “I help people figure out their purpose. I help people figure out what they want to go. I help figure out what is their unstoppable life.” Nice but hard to do. I remember being in a meeting that I wasn’t happy with my current situation work-wise, this is many years ago and what led me to coaching at the time and someone asked me what do I want.
He said, “What do you want?” He brought me to tears because I knew I didn’t want the situation I was in. I didn’t want that but you know what I wanted and so what you’re saying is we are very clear usually in our fears. We’re not clear on our biggest path because our fears are so clear that we don’t even have to give the mental energy to dream anything, not even big, to dream for ourselves.
Our fears are what keep us small and stuck, this idea of not even giving yourself permission to imagine anything different. I don’t even want to use the word, more but anything different than what you’ve got. This clarity for me came as I was in an unhealthy loveless marriage to the wrong gender. There were a lot of layers to that. There was this very defining moment in my life. I have four daughters and they were pretty young at the time. The youngest was a baby. We were sitting together, it was a Saturday morning and we were having breakfast.
At that time, every decision I made was fear-based. What will cause less trauma? I won’t have as much conflict. I won’t have to talk to people. I can just, “Let’s do this. It won’t hurt as much.” I felt myself physically getting smaller and smaller. I looked at the girls at the table and I thought, “What would I tell them if they came to me in this situation? If they were feeling the way I’m feeling, what would I want for them?” I knew instantly it wasn’t like, “Suck it up. You made your bed now. Live with that.” I would say, “Go do these things. The world deserves you to play big. You get to take up space. You get to be honest, authentic and vulnerable. Make this work for you.”
When we choose bravely on purpose, we start to choose bigger things. When we recognize our choices are brave, we get a little gutsier.
At that moment, I thought, “Crap.” If that’s what I want them to do, I have to show them how to do it. That’s what I had to do but it unleashed me. It switched me like that from fear-based to limitless possibility. It switched me from fear to brave. If my wife were doing this, it’s to show them that they can do it too. Let’s figure out how.
There’s no turning back. The moment you say, “I will never again make a choice out of fear,” which is what I’m hearing you’re saying, what happened next? The moment you say, «I will not pick a vegetable, food, car, trip, person or client.» Sometimes we’ll pick a client because of our fear because it’s not the client we want, we know that but there’ll going to be money, which is fear. How does life look like if you are literally going to your biggest fears?
First, I want to say it would be a total lie to say that 100% of the time, at every moment, at every second that I avoid fear. I’m afraid all the time and sometimes I catch myself making decisions out of fear. When you said food, that might be it. One morning, I wanted to grab a bagel but I grabbed a nectarine but the good news was the nectarine was delicious. I felt better about that decision but like, “The bagel, that’s going to sit on me all day. I don’t do well with gluten.”
That’s a silly example but the answer to that question is I have a method and it’s the method that I use to get myself out of that miserable, small, fear-based space and was able to create this shift, get a divorce, buy my own car on my own house for the first time in my adult life, in my freaking 40s. It was the first time that I was able to run a business on my terms that I loved. I could pitch to clients because I loved what I was doing and I believed what I was doing. The method is now I call it the BRAVE Method.
At the time, it was the things that I was doing but now it has a name and it even has a book that’s coming out on October 28th. BRAVE is an acronym. Everything I do is about brave. Brave is my business. Brave stands for boundaries, the three R’s I mentioned, reassessment, reframing, resilience, action and accountability, vulnerability and then expand and empower.
The first four steps can and do go in every order, whatever order you need to take you to the next step of the process. When you do those four things, you end at expand and empower. Choosing bravely allows us to embody expansion and to be empowered, which I have to say is inside work. No one empowers you but you.
I don’t call myself an influencer by any means but we do influence people. In that rule, I love the quote from Marianne Williamson is that, “Who are we to play small and not give others a chance to see someone else play big and therefore get inspired?” She says it’s a light that scares us, not our darkness because fear is comfy.
Brave Life: Choosing bravely allows us to embody expansion and to be empowered, which is inside work, no one empowers you but you.
I love that you said that, that fear of the light, that fear of success. Brave only sucks before you do it. That’s the key. I’ve been using these radical terms, which I love. I was at podcast movement. It hit me and I’m like, “I’m creating a revolution of people who are choosing every day brave.” We start by identifying small things that we wouldn’t have normally qualified as brave. Some days, we were talking before we started about mental health in children and there are some days, the bravest thing we can do is get out of bed.
Some days, it’s make a phone call, write a pitch or show up on an interview, pick fruit or maybe not. Maybe the brave thing is to pick a bagel because you haven’t eaten in two days, whatever it is. We’re redefining what it means to be brave or taking it away from this big, massive action that we’ve identified as, “That thing is so brave.”
We then start to recognize there are so many moments, hundreds of moments throughout our day where we consciously and thoughtfully go, “I’m going to pick this.” That is going to feel brave, going to allow it to feel brave because we start that train. That’s where we get into we choose bigger, we win bigger and it’s contagious. The more you do it, the less it sucks.
I love that you said that, “Yes, I made the choice that day at the breakfast table,” or at least an internal choice that changed the trajectory of your life and every day, I practice it versus, “I live a great brave life.” I’m the queen of clarity some people tell me and some days I’m the queen of confusion.
I confuse me and people in my life. It’s a practice but like clarity, happiness or balance, it’s not a destination. Brave is not the destination. It’s that, “Am I leaning towards that?” It’s that you’re always walking towards it or away from it. Am I walking in the space of bravery? Am I walking, thinking, acting or feeling from the fear place? It’s an energy and it’s two words, not a rival.
Brave is energy. It’s a beautiful way to describe it, it’s constant and that sounds terrifying but it’s constant awareness. I have a book coming out and I told you. The book is called F*CK FEARLESS: Making The Brave Leap. Let me explain why. It’s because we have been fed, culturally, this notion that we should want to be fearless, that we should want to live without fear, that it will make us better or stronger. It’s not true and it’s not viable either.
Our fears are what keep us small and stuck.
Fear is a natural human emotion. It saves our lives. It keeps us from walking in the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk. We want to normalize fear. We don’t want to be ashamed of it. We don’t want to be afraid of it. We don’t want to hide from it. We also don’t want it to own us. I think fearlessness is for sociopaths and three-year-olds and I call BS on it. I am a big personality. I love the F word a lot and so I might as well go there with the book but the idea is I want you to pick bravery over fear and over fearlessness.
Bravery is like black and white. You cannot have white without black. If you become fearless, meaning you remove fear from your life then you remove bravery because chances are you’re living in fear.
It’s not possible and the people who say, “I’m so fearless,” it’s a misuse of words. It means they’re gutsy. It means they’re brave. It doesn’t mean they don’t ever have it. There’s so much shame attached to fear externally and internally we feel so bad and a lot of my brave work is around surrender. That’s where I was going with that started with the book. We’re working hard. We’re finishing edits. We’re going to send it to the printer and finalizing the cover.
It’s exciting but I’m going to hit a point where as far as the actual book itself goes, it’s time to surrender. It’s no longer within my control. What’s in my control at that point is getting my launch team out, how I feel about it, that’s it. My partner had a book launch, which was awesome, it was exciting and she hit bestseller in five categories.
She was so anxiety-ridden and I’m like, “Babe, it’s all done. The work is all finished. All you have to do is celebrate and enjoy.” Celebration is a huge component. I talk about it a lot in the book. It’s a huge component of bravery to me. It’s acknowledging those moments where we’ve chosen bravely, where we’ve done this work, honor ourselves, love ourselves for it and bring the community in because celebration begets celebration. It’s brave.
What are you excited most about in the coming 12 months?
I’m very excited about the book. I don’t know when this is going to air but I don’t know if you know this or no but this day that we’re doing this interview, September 22nd, there are 100 days left in the year 2021. Don’t forget. You can surrender with a plan. Surrender isn’t inaction. It’s detaching yourself from results. For the next 12 months, I have some big stuff coming.
Brave Life: We choose bigger, we win bigger and it’s contagious. And the more you do it, the less it sucks.
In January 2022, my company, my team and I are producing a two-day event workshop. It’s not a summit, there aren’t a bunch of speakers but we’re teaching The BRAVE Method and we’re doing live coaching, breakouts and everyone’s getting these gorgeous packages with workbooks some swag and some fun things. We want it to be as immersive of an experience as possible for being virtual, which it will still be in January 2022. We are up-leveling my group program, which is called Intentionally Brave Entrepreneurs.
In January 2022, we’re going to have two tracks, one for new entrepreneurs and one for experienced entrepreneurs, which we had previously been focusing on experienced, now we’re going to offer a track for both. I’m onboarding three new coaches onto the team. They’ve all gone through my program. It feels excited to talk we’re leaning into that expansion because we have been listening to what the community wants. We have been asking good questions, getting lots of clarity on what’s going to feel good and how do we build this. If we want this result, what things need to happen?
We’re in this huge planning phase now. It’s exciting and it’s terrifying because my team has tripled so we’re onboarding, which is much work. I keep reminding myself like this is painful because growth is painful. There are many SOP’s, I know but then we’re creating them because they’re jobs that I and the one other person on my team were doing. We didn’t have the SOP’s because we were just doing the things.
Now we have so many but it’s a growth process that’s uncomfortable, painful and brave but I know we’re so close. We’re just weeks away from getting this part done and having things up and running so that we can move to the next phase. I like to remind everybody that I do this too. The things that I coach, train and mentor on. I do this too. I walk this walk. I get you. I feel your pain and it’s worth it. We can do hard things.
What is one action you want your readers to walk away with?
I would love to have your readers look at their day and think about which things could feel brave to them that they might not have previously identified as brave and then celebrate those choices.
Where can people find you?
You can surrender with a plan. It’s not surrendering. It isn’t inaction. It’s just detaching yourself from results.
The website is VickeryAndCo.com. I’m @VickeryAndCo on Instagram and Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn although I’m not there very often, just full disclosure. Facebook at Vickery and Co. I’m easy to find. My kids think I’m a celebrity because if they type in my name, I pop up on Google but it’s really just good SEO.
Any parting thoughts?
I said something that I believe and I mean and you resonated with it. We can do hard things. I want to say now we are all experiencing collective trauma and we’re all still doing hard things in the midst of the collective trauma. Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is nothing. Pause, rest, take a break, say no, be kind. You can do hard things but you don’t have to do them every second of every day and that’s brave.
Thank you so much, Heather, for showing up.
Thank you so much for having me.
Important Links:
- Heather – Heather Vickery
- The Brave Files Podcast
- F*CK FEARLESS: Making The Brave Leap
- Instagram – Heather Vickery
- Twitter – Heather Vickery
- LinkedIn – Heather Vickery
- Vickery and Co – Facebook
- www.vickeryandco.com – Website
- www.vickeryandco.com/BraveonPurpose – Free Community
- Get the Book – Book
About Heather Vickery
Heather Vickery is an award-winning entrepreneur, business owner, and success coach. But Heather isn’t just a savvy businesswoman. She’s an inspiration.
After a major life transformation and divorce, her world was turned upside down. Suddenly the mother of four had the freedom to be her most authentic self, which empowered her with the confidence she needed to repair, rebuild, and relearn who she was. Today, Heather leverages her entrepreneurial skills and expertise to coach individuals towards greater personal and professional fulfillment through Vickery and Co., her transformational coaching practice. A celebrated public speaker, Heather inspires audiences and empowers attendees with the tools they need to live bold and meaningful lives through her story of personal bravery, perseverance, and resilience. Heather’s approach helps clients leverage fear and turn it into intentional bravery!
Heather is the author of Gratitude Journal: Shift Your Focus and Grow Grateful: A Gratitude Journal for Kids and Families. She’s also the executive producer and host of The Brave Files Podcast. A strong believer in strengthening her community, Heather is active in many charitable organizations. She is obsessed with Musical Theater and loves to travel.
The path to happiness is difficult and complicated. What do you need to do to get started on this journey? In this episode, Dolores Hirschmann sits down for a conversation with happiness guide and Gestalt therapist Sonia Weyers. Sonia shares the experiences that placed her on the path of the happiness therapy and talks about what happiness means and what achieving it requires. Tune in for an inspirational conversation here.
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Happiness And The Self: A Journey With Sonia Weyers
Sonia, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you to connect. I always call it the clarity journey and some people are like, «It wasn’t that clear.» Tell me about that journey that brought you to this moment, maybe for clarity.
Dolores, I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was indeed a long journey. My journey of clarity is ever-emerging.
We have the thread of moments, decisions or circumstances that at the end of the day got you to this moment in this interview.
I should start from the very beginning. There was something amiss in my relationship with my mother through no intent of hers but left me unsure who I was, what I liked and what I wanted. It was a long journey for me. Even ordering food from a restaurant menu was a struggle sometimes. I went along a path where I was competent. I was good at Math. I was a serial student. I studied Engineering. I got a Master’s in Statistics. I got a PhD in Business with a focus on Economic Analysis and Policy.
Happiness: To have an envelope of photos of happy memories or that have people you love who you don’t see very often is one tool to elevate your mood.
I could feel that it wasn’t fulfilling for me. It was a very prestigious path but it wasn’t fulfilling. Sometime in there, I decided, «I wanted to change the world, writing these academic papers that five people read or I wasn’t going to do it.» At some point, I decided, «I was going to change the world with the kids I was going to have. I was going to raise them to be good people. Through the ripple effects, that would change the world.» That appeased me a little bit and that’s when I had my first child.
I went to the end of that. I finished my PhD and I even got a job teaching and doing research at a business school near me. Eventually, by the time I had my third child, I had gone to the end of that path and I was ready to do something else. Somewhere in there, I had gotten into personal therapy to help me along my path of self-discovery. I was not a very happy teenager and that’s an important step. Now, I call myself Your Happiness Guide. It didn’t fall in my lap. It was an earned title. I’m going to fast forward a little bit here. I spent a few years being a scrapbooking consultant helping people do creative photo albums.
That’s a tangent I wasn’t expecting.
A lot of people didn’t expect that like, «You did all those degrees for that?» It was a little bit entrepreneurial, social and creative. It brought people some happiness to enhance their photographic memory. Looking back, that was the premise of my activities to help people find happiness and fulfillment in their lives. Along the path, I trained as a therapist. I started in 2008 practicing therapy. I’ve been broadening and developing more personal development programs. I’ve been trying to get some visibility and that’s how I met you at an online conference about getting on stages. That’s how I got here.
Happiness is a loaded word. It’s supposed to uplift you on bringing to the higher vibration but for many of us, it could be one of those things that are too complex to even wrap our head around it. Let’s start with that. What is happiness?
It’s up to you to decide what happiness is to you. I can tell you what it is to me or how I think of it. I think of it as each person has their own mix of peace, meaning and joy. Some people are more into joy. They like to laugh, joke around and have fun. The place I like to be is when I feel peaceful, I’m not stressed. I feel like I can handle things. I have a sense of inner peace but then also some amount of meaning. Meaning is also a loaded word. I’m working for a goal that has meaning to me and when I’m talking about helping people that it’s meaningful to them too. That’s how in a nutshell, I would say.
Also, it’s easy to say you’re happy when everything is going well. You’re this happy or that happy. You might want to be happier even when things are going well, but it’s in those circumstances where you don’t think happiness belongs there that I found in my own journey the real rewards of all my personal work. I’m thinking in particular at the end of my parents’ lives. My mom, with who I had the relationship, that something was wrong. I’ll tell a short story about how that ended.
It’s up to you to decide what happiness is to you.
It’s about December 15th, 2018. It has been a rough year. My mom had a cognitive decline. My dad had many surgeries. The more my dad was in surgery, the more my mom declined rapidly. It was a dreadful year. I moved them from Belgium, where they were, to a retirement home near me. It has been a tough year and I’ve invited them over for tea. My mom doesn’t talk anymore at this point. She is inside in her own silence. My dad who is both exhausted from his surgeries is also deeply sad about this.
I was asking her, «Mom, do you want some tea? Do you want some sugar in your tea?» My dad was like, «Don’t bother. She is not going to answer.» I was like, «Dad, I’m not talking to her so she is answering. I’m just talking to her.» On that day, my mom wasn’t talking. I asked her if she wanted tea. She said, «Yes.» I asked her if she wanted more. She said, «More.»
She said yes and no to something. She said more and said a bit. My dad was moved to tears. After all that, I sat down across the table from her. I could see that she was looking at me but she was looking a little bit confused. I lifted my glasses and then she smiled at me. Had I not done my personal work, this moment would have been totally out of my reach.
The personal work journey, which we all can do in our own way and I know you are one resource for people and for women specifically. A lot of people say, «I’ve done a lot of therapy and nothing has changed.» The reality of the personal work journey is about expanding our capacity to be in this world like you said, «If I hadn’t done my personal work, I wouldn’t have noticed neither appreciated nor be moved,» because you were moved by the moment that your mother smiled to you. You would have missed it.
The other thing you said, which you may not have intended it to say or I’m just putting things together, is that when you were finding your path, there was a little bit of emptiness inside and all the PhDs were not cutting it. You went into the scrapbook project, however you want to call it. You were saying how in some ways, by organizing and arranging memories, which is what a scrapbook and photo album is, you were reinforcing happiness in your customers or in the people that participated. Here’s what I’m curious about. What is the role of images or photographic memory in the building of almost like happiness well?
Happiness: Some people are more into the joy. They like to laugh, joke around, and have fun.
I pieced this path backward because now I’m all about helping people find and experience their true happiness. In looking back, it seems that that was the beginning of it but I haven’t taken the photo albums with me. It’s certainly one avenue. It’s funny that you bring that up because it was the activity I asked people to do when I ran a happiness challenge. I gave them daily activities and it was around photos. I don’t have an answer to that but I personally love my photos. If you’ve asked that question, maybe you do, too.
Usually, the photos we keep are the memories we love unless we find some comfort, joy or peace in a memory. Even in a difficult situation, we wouldn’t keep that photo necessarily or at least not properly tucked away in a nice album. It might be somewhere forgotten. In some ways, unconsciously, a photo album will always have happiness incited because we curated only the moments that we wanted to preserve.
I call it superficial. That’s not bad but it’s in the moment. It doesn’t change anything underneath. To have an envelope of photos that have people that you love who you don’t see often or memories that you like that were happy memories, it’s certainly one tool to elevate your mood almost instantly is to interact with those images. That’s an interesting question.
One of the things I love to do with my work is I believe that in the stage of my life and many of the people I work with and my clients, it’s all about coming whole and integrating. It’s like a moment in our life where we are running businesses where we want to impact and personal fulfillment. It’s all about integrating. I believe that whether they make sense or not, every single thing we did through our journey somehow makes sense, even though it might sound crazy.
It’s easy to say you’re happy when everything’s going well.
I like helping my clients and I always see how we can integrate past experiences to make the work that we do now even richer because it becomes unique. There are not many PhDs, engineers, data scientists, gestalt therapists and happiness coaches who also did photo albums and scrapbooks. Not leaving anything behind allows you to stand out in the marketplace. Of all the people you could help, who do you love and focus on helping? Why?
I have two answers to that. When I work with clients one-on-one in therapy, those are the people who find me. I tend to work with young women who are in their high-20s or low-30s and who are still early in their adult life. I find that’s a good place. They have grown up enough and they have enough maturity. They’re able to look back to their experiences, to look in and to look at what and be willing and be able to do the work. In the therapy work, that’s what I prefer.
I have a line of also personal development programs. I enjoy working more with mature women who are maybe in a similar stage of life to mine. Maybe you have had some kids who are not all out of the house but also who have some flexibility in their time. It’s business owners who have some flexibility in their time so that they can put in the time to do because everybody has got online programs that people can buy but if they don’t do them, it doesn’t change anything. I have two slightly different audiences depending on the kind of work or favored audiences, which was your question.
Let me ask you this because I want to make sure that if anybody is reading and that this resonates, that they reach out to you. What do I need to be feeling to reach out to you? What do I need to be experiencing to say, «Sonia is the perfect person for me?»
If you’re feeling like there’s something missing in your life like things on the outside are looking good, there’s a bit of a void and things aren’t quite as fulfilling as you would like. Also, if you have relationships that aren’t fulfilling because I have a very relational approach. Relationships are also some of the biggest determinants of a life well-lived, it turns out.
It’s a sense that you want more from life. That’s the perfect person for my personal development line of work. The people who call me for therapy, something is not getting at them in a way that’s interfering much more with their life. It’s a question of degree. It’s similar things but they’re more intense in the therapy world than in the personal development world.
Happiness Now! A Guided Journey: Unleash motivation and take action to experience greater Peace, Meaning and Joy
What is Gestalt Therapy? What does it stand for?
Gestalt Therapy was founded by Fritz Perls, who was a dissident of psychoanalysis. If I put it very simply, where psychoanalysis seeks to understand why Gestalt is all about looking at how things happen and how the experience is. The Gestalt therapist tool in working with clients is, «What’s going on with me?» As I listen to this person, «What am I seeing, hearing, imagining and feeling in my body?» That’s going to inform me to often be curious, like cultivate the curiosity to get the other person’s experience but also be attentive to the way that they enter contact with me.
It’s not about doing anything right. It’s funny because a lot of people come to me and they’re looking for a manual for the right decision or other people are not behaving right. It’s not about that. It’s the more you can be aware of your own way of being and the impact that that has on the world and the more you have keys to impact and change that. It’s all about the space I between, looking at the space in between and what happens in there.
It sounds like it’s more connected with your heart and intuition versus the intellectual, logical processing. That keeps it up here but it doesn’t necessarily integrate it. We could talk about a lot of books but let’s talk about your book. You have a book.
I wrote this book in French and English. It’s Happiness Now! A Guided Journey. It’s a personal development book. You can get it on Amazon or you can ask me for a signed copy. If you pay for shipping, I’ll send it to you. You were asking me to describe my book. I take the reader by the hand through a first part that’s on mindset. You want more happiness like, «Why? What’s going on that you want that?» It’s not always going to be easy because the personal development work sometimes gets a bit harder before it gets better. You have to go look at what’s not working in that a lot of people are in denial.
It’s like cleaning a closet. Before the closet is nice, clean and organized, it’s very messy.
That’s a great analogy. There’s an element of pain that doesn’t come when you’re cleaning the closet. The first part is on mindset. The second part is four chapters. One is about your physical health. I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to be one, but there are ways to be mindful of your physical health and look at different aspects. I invite the reader to ponder some questions, your emotional health, relationships and then something around spirituality and meaning.
It’s spirituality light but still it’s the idea that we’re in a big world, «What is there beyond me and beyond us? What’s your relationship to that?» In the third part, there are 23 activities that people can try. There are sometimes as simple as a breathing exercise or talk about the morning routine. There are 23 activities that I suggest to people that they can try so that they can have their own menu.
If you don’t take responsibility for your own happiness, it isn’t going to happen.
I enjoyed our conversation. I love this journey of yours from this science, maybe a more exact space of numbers and logic. I’m hoping that will fulfill that little bit of a void and that the permission to go from the logic to the heart, into the more intuitive and feeling side of you to do the work that you’re doing. I want to celebrate how lucky the people that you will get to work with are. I usually interview people who fell into our journey or into the type of work but it sounds like you were very intentional in arriving where you are. That’s something worth celebrating.
I was certainly intentional about finding the light and finding something, but the further I got into my journey then at some point, it became rewarding. It didn’t start off that way right away. Now, I’m all about the journey. I’m available to explore your journey and the people who might want to explore your journey. I can listen to it all.
Anything else you would like to add?
I also have a freebie. That’s the 5 Things in the Way of Your TRUE Happiness if people want to download that.
What’s the URL for that?
Happiness: Psychoanalysis is all about the space in between and looking at it and what happens in there.
My website is Eudokima.com/en. The other side is in French.
We’re all about clarity and action in Masters in Clarity. What is one action that you want to invite our readers to take as we wrap up this episode?
In true personal development form, I would like your readers to think about the relationships that are most important to them and then see which ones are working well in the way they want and enjoy that. The ones that are not working as well as they would like, I would like them to look inside themselves and see something that they could do.
The personal development work sometimes gets a bit harder before it gets better.
Maybe they need to ask for something, apologize for something or suggest something new. I believe happiness is an inside job and you can get others to help but if you don’t take responsibility for your own happiness, it’s not going to happen. It would have been so easy for me to say, «I’m unhappy because of my mom,» but if I do that, then I’m stuck being unhappy.
Thank you so much, Sonia, for your time and for showing up for our readers.
Thank you, Dolores.
Important Links:
- Happiness Now! A Guided Journey
- Amazon – Happiness Now! A Guided Journey
- 5 Things in the Way of Your TRUE Happiness
- Eudokima.com/en
- https://www.Instagram.com/soniaweyers.eudokima/
- Sonia LinkedIn
- Eudokima Facebook
About Sonia Weyers
Sonia Weyers is Your Happiness Guide and a Gestalt-therapist. Her vision is to contribute to the awakening of human consciousness and help people to live together on our planet with more peace, meaning and joy. Her mission and purpose is to empower you to experience your TRUE happiness by guiding you to discover your personal keys to the life that YOU dream of.
You don’t have to sacrifice your values to grow your business. K.C. Rossi is a mindset and self-leadership coach who helps holistic entrepreneurs, healers, and coaches scale profitable, soul-aligned businesses without burning out. She chats with Dolores Hirschmann on how you can be authentic and successful in your business venture. It’s all about balance. K.C. also discusses The Soulprint Method™ and how you can harness your yin and yang qualities to align and unlock your potentials. Listen in to this conversation for more business and personal development insights.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here:
The Soulprint Method™: How To Scale A Profitable Soul-Aligned Business With K.C. Rossi
I’m so excited to be introducing to you, K.C. Rossi. She is a Mindset and Self-Leadership Coach. She jokes that business is in her DNA as she now helps holistic entrepreneurs, healers and coaches scale a profitable and soul-aligned business without burning out. Here’s what I’m most excited about talking with K.C. She has been an entrepreneur for many years. She runs more of a brick-and-mortar business for many years with multiple seven-figure sales. She has been in the role of business from many angles. I’m curious to ask her opinion around commitment, discipline, systems and how does she coach her clients, which are healers and coaches, into following their heart and soul while being disciplined and committed in their business. Don’t miss this interview.
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I’m so excited, K.C., to have this conversation and talk a little bit about your journey. I call it the clarity journey. It could have been the confusion journey. It’s clarity for a second and all the rest was like, «Where am I going?» Talk to me about how did you get to this moment doing this work?
I have been an entrepreneur for many years. It has been a long journey and one that I have had many different iterations from a brick-and-mortar confection manufacturing company all the way to the iteration of coaching. The clarity came in the line of doing and not overthinking. I was lucky enough for the first ten businesses that I did over two decades. In the first ten, I had the same business partner. We were able to play off each other’s synergy. She was someone that was all about act then think.
That helped me because my first corporation began when I was nineteen. I didn’t have a lot of business experience or an MBA or anything like that. It was like, «I had an idea. Let’s create it from a white piece of paper and hit the ground running.» It was very helpful to have that partner be like, «Let’s do this. We can do this and not overthink it.» To me, the clarity did come from acting, learning on the job, being open-minded and also aware of the surroundings not only with our team and employees but what does the marketplace need now? Continuing to ask that question has given me longevity for many years.
You’re a coach. I’m a coach. We’re in this micro-world that all of a sudden, everybody is a coach but there’s a common experience for many of us. I wonder if it’s true for you as well, which is when we arrive at the work that we do where we are in some ways building our legacy work or giving back work in whatever market we are.
In my experience, it’s almost like a coming home work. Meaning that all of a sudden, you’re able to be fully yourself and holistically bring everything you’ve learned and experienced, the university of hard knocks experience. All the failures are part of your learning. Is that true for you? Is this coming home holistic like, «All that I am now being and doing comes together to serve?»
I love the way that you put that together. I am in alignment with that message. It took some time and iteration to give myself permission to be all of me. That’s what I help my clients do now is to be unapologetic and celebrate all the different facets in your life and world. I know the contrast to that because when I had my confection manufacturing company, probably because I was compensating for age and experience, I was extremely professional, buttoned-up, black and white in my 9:00 to 5:00 because I didn’t feel that my colorful personal life should blend. It should be segmented.
You can be soul-aligned and profitable. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
It has taken years, wisdom, experience and the school of hard knocks to realize, «That doesn’t need to be that way. We get to be the artist of our life. Not only is it more enjoyable but it’s also more sustainable to be integrated and to bring all those aspects of who we are.» We’re going to have our tribe be much more attracted to us when we show up fully, authentically and it’s not like, «If I meet you in person, it’s a real disconnect to what I see on your lives or website.»
This has opened up and blossomed in such a different way. I feel like now we get to cultivate something that maybe we’ve always wanted but we only were taking pieces and parts of ourselves. Now, all of a sudden, it’s like, «Okay, cool.» We can keep our followers right in our journey because we’re always growing, learning and experimenting. That’s also the beauty and fluidity of being 100% who you are on a consistent basis.
The keyword that you mentioned and many of your followers and clients probably are attracted to you because of it, is the word permission. It’s not that we need it from anybody but we needed to give it to ourselves to understand that we are one human and that having the permission to be that one human in every aspect of our lives becomes powerful. It’s almost like the analogy of a leaking faucet because, when you are only operating from half of you in your 9-to-5, there’s a leaking of energy that is consistent. It makes your life and job not sustainable and it leads to burnout.
I had a burnout in that position. You hit the nail on the head. You’re right with that consistent leak. We don’t realize that our energy is being diverted, maybe in multiple little pinholes if you’re thinking about it like a hose. When you’re in alignment, all of a sudden this powerhouse comes out in one direct channel. Everything from your core values to your messaging and marketing, it’s in this flow now.
The permission piece also ties into the mindset aspects of, «What are we carrying from the past? What are we carrying in from shoulds for many kinds of a good girl?» Once we can start looking at those in a very curious way and dissolving them and clearing them out, it becomes so much easier to get into that flow. Sometimes for readers where it’s like, «That sounds great but how do I do it?» That’s an interesting conversation but I’ll let you direct the question.
It’s what we’re jumping into. Let’s talk about the work that you do. It’s all nice as you say, «Go be in alignment. You’ll be attractive,” but what if you’ve lost your footing and you don’t even know what your line is? What does alignment look like for me when I’ve been out of alignment for so long?» I know that’s the work you do.
Soul Aligned Business: When we get to be the artist of our life, not only is it more enjoyable, but it’s also more sustainable to be integrated and bring all those aspects of who we are.
Let’s pick up right on that piece like, «What does it look like when I’ve been out of alignment for so long that I’ve lost touch with exactly who I am?» For me, I’m very passionate about using ourselves as client-zero because we can only teach what we have experienced ourselves. Also, we have to be able to be that leader and lean into our own self-leadership before we can help anybody in our sphere, friends, family and clients. We have to start with ourselves.
The biggest thing that could be helpful and also a discipline and a challenge is minimizing inputs. When we’re looking outside of ourselves and being tuned in to the external stimuli whether it’s social media or the news, it’s easy to get lost and have that distance between who we are and what lights us up. Depending on where you are, even thinking about like, «What lights me up?» can feel like this thing off in the distant future.
If a reader was feeling like, «That sounds airy-fairy,» dial it way back to the simplicity of starting to ask yourself what you like. What fabrics feel good on your skin? What food do you go, «This is amazing. I am enjoying this?» I remember when I planted a Japanese eggplant for the first time and tasting a simple Japanese eggplant with a little bit of salt. I was like, «I’m enjoying the heck out of this. This is amazing.» It took me a lot of years to be able to like, «Let’s quiet down enough and ask super-simple questions like, ‘What makes me feel good? When do I find myself laughing the most?'»
When we are off our path or maybe out of alignment and it has been that way so long, that our new normal has become this dampened-down version of who we are that we’ve accepted, let’s make it so simple that we’re not looking for these ginormous transformations in an instant. Even though we’re in instant gratification in our world, this type of work, self-development, personal development and spiritual development, it’s the long game. When you truly slow down and minimize inputs, something magical happens and you start to get this, «That’s it.» You get to stack those «that’s it» moments and this starts to develop this keen awareness of your new or true identity.
Your identity, the one that you come home, is the moment you come home to you. I love how you broke it down as it’s the stacking of yeses and the yes, «These sheets feel soft and comfortable or these don’t.» Sometimes it’s so much easier to start by identifying the noes to find the yes. It’s like, «This person doesn’t feel right. These shoes feel too tight. This food is not sitting well.»
I’m a business coach like you and people say, «Should I put this in my content? Should I do ten models versus five? Fifty worksheets, two pages long?» I said, «I don’t care what you do.» Honestly, there’s no magic formula. I could say yes or no to either and they would both be wrong or right. What is true is any one of us taking someone by the hand and taking them on a path for an accomplishment, whatever that is, it is a journey.
Whether you’re listening to Casey and me or our clients, it’s about understanding your clarity in the journey you’re taking your people through. What you explained was the journey you take people through is, «Micro-action is to find your yeses and start with your no or yes.» Once you start getting and revealing the yeses and stacking them up, you now start walking in your path. If that is true then where are we going when we stack those yeses? What is possible when we have that journey with you that brings us somewhere? What does that somewhere look like?
There is no right way. The right way is the one that makes you feel good.
That is going to be unique depending on you and what I look at as your soul print. I believe that we have all come into this world with a very specific mission and we have an imprint or microfiche of our destiny. Getting in alignment helps us get closer to what that is. You need to have forward motion, momentum and take action. Get out of your head in order to get on that journey but we also have to have some destination in mind.
We have to have a little bit of direction so we don’t go around in circles. Especially now with digital marketing being so increased and getting bigger so we don’t look at everyone else around us and think, «That’s the path I need to be on.» You can drive yourself insane spinning around in circles going, «They hit their six figures this way. I need to do this, that and the other thing.»
There is no path that you can buy in a box.
There is no one right way. The right way is the one that makes you feel good that feels like it is clicking. You’re able to look at your work as worship and in a way where you can be profitable as well so you can be soul-aligned and profitable. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That’s when you know, «Here’s my sweet spot. Here’s my ikigai, my reason for being.» The way that I look at getting that, «How do you put the stack yeses in action and motion? What does that look like?» The easiest way to do that is being so tuned into your deep why. This is going to be unique. Why are you doing this? Why did you craft your business? Why did you choose to take a path that is a little bit rockier?
There are a lot of unknowns as an entrepreneur. You’ve got to have grit and resiliency times ten. I feel like it’s a very unique personality. It’s something that’s almost baked into your DNA to be a business owner and have longevity. Why are you even doing this, number one? What do you want it to look like? That’s where the permission and creativity come in because now, all of a sudden, it’s like, «I get to create the rules.» Dolores, you probably find this as well. Excellent entrepreneurs tend to have a little rebel in them and some change-maker qualities in them. That’s the part that’s exciting to enhance to be like, «Let’s be the most unique entrepreneur and win because I’m creating a joy path for myself.»
I didn’t know that taps into our intuition and decisions become easier and all that. Let me bring in a little bit of an angle here because I see this in myself and my clients. This is the blessing and the curse of our kinds of people. We are creators. We are intuitive. We love the alignment and the capacity to fly when something feels right. You’ve been in business for a long time. I’ve been in business for a long time, multiple different businesses like you. We know that the number one rule to grow a business is consistency, commitment and discipline. How do we stay in the alignment of being creative and feeling fulfilled but at the same time play the game of business?
Soul Aligned Business: Don’t look for these ginormous transformations in an instant. Self-development is a long game.
You have to have both. This is all about the yin-yang strategy. You have the feminine fluidity of yin. That’s all that delicious, creative and nurturing piece that you talked about that we love to swim in but in order to have balance, we need the yang as well. That’s understanding our metrics, having that solid foundation of systems and honoring and respecting all of the masculine and the action pieces that bring together this holistic synergy. That’s how you’re going to have something that has longevity.
If you have the tendency to want to be in that creative mode and a lot of people do. I serve healers. They’re like, «I’m not doing it for the money. I just want to help people and stay in what I do best and do the healing.» «I don’t want to do the marketing and sales. I don’t want to have to look at my numbers and spreadsheets.» In order to have the most impact, we need to bring both of those pieces together.
You can start small and do it in a way that works for you. You don’t have to adapt the latest project management tool and go down the rabbit hole of learning ClickUp or Asana. You don’t have to do that if that’s not in alignment to you but there are pieces that you do have to do, even if it’s stretching you outside of your comfort zone because science says, «When we write it down and what we focus on, that gets done.» Whatever we measure, we’re going to have more times where we’re reaching our goal or even surpassing our goal.
If you’re more artistic and creative and I have this right next to me. Use a big blank artist pad. Get colored markers, bring your kid out, be playful but at least write down your goals. Have an idea of where you’re going because, if you’re not measuring it, this is how you’re going to be willy-nilly. It’s going to feel like the Wild West. You’re going to have those days where you’re like, «What did I do? I’m not sure.» If someone asks you, «How has your quarter rolling out?» You’re going to look at them dumbfounded like, «Huh?» We don’t want to do that.
Find a system that works for you. Create one. If you’re visual, use the Post-it Note system with different colored post-it notes and big sheets of white paper where you can play. You don’t have to fit the box and use something that someone is saying, «This is the tool you must use in order to enhance performance.» You have to do what works for you. If there isn’t a product or app, which I would be doubtful there isn’t that fits your style then now you get to tap into your creativity and create it.
This taps into another part of your work, which I love. It’s part of why people hire people like us in some loving accountability and the concept of commitment and leadership. I always challenge any of my clients who say, «I want to help people.» I’m like, «How true is that statement if you’re not willing to step beyond your comfort zone to be a leader to step up and stand out as a leader does in order to help the people you want to help?» Talk to me about leadership and the role of self-leadership and the role it has in this kind of work.
It’s so crucial because we want to follow people and get inspired by mentors that clearly walk their talk. It’s no longer going to work to just do as I say and not as I do and it’s apparent. Even if you have a glossy Instagram feed, we’re getting much smarter as consumers. We can feel a BS meter much quicker than we ever used to because we’re living in the boxes post-COVID or through COVID. We’re spending a lot more time in general on the computer. In that, we’re getting keen and aware of what we’re drawn to.
Write down your goals and have an idea of where you’re going because if you don’t measure it, you’re going to be willy-nilly.
Authenticity and self-leadership and following the work that you’re teaching other people to do, it’s crucial. If you don’t have that, you will be left behind, in my opinion. One of the things that years ago when I was afraid to do video, I had to go live on Facebook on my to-do list for an entire year. It felt like Groundhog Day. I was like, «What is my problem? Why can’t I get out of my own way?»
It wasn’t until I was starting to help clients increase their visibility that I was like, «Integrity is one of my top core values. If I don’t go and lead the way, increase my own visibility, use my voice and create a platform and that’s when I created my podcast then there’s no way that I can help clients do this. I have to traverse the terrain first and be brave enough to take that first step.» That’s not necessary to have followers. That is self-leadership first. That’s going back to me being client-zero once I have that dialed in because we only want to teach what we know. Not what we’ve learned but what we know and experience.
When you talk about our profession in coaching and I don’t know if you’re probably seeing this too, in 2021, it has become this exploding trend. Previously it was, «Build your online course. Get a passive income.» Now, it’s, «Be a coach.» It’s because we’ve all experienced this massive shock with 2020 and everything that came about with that year. People needed help, guidance, mentorship, direction and accountability.
Now, the trend is, «You can be a coach too.» That’s awesome. We have to look at experience and mentors that are following what they advise their clients to do, «Are you living that path? Is it who you are inside and out on a cellular level?» Those are the people that I want to follow and invest in because I truly believe that coaches need coaches as well if we’re going to continue to optimize and thrive. Hopefully, that answered your question. It was a little bit long-winded.
We are in that space. People say, «I don’t want to be a coach because there are so many coaches out there.» I said, «That’s good news. That means there’s a lot of demand for what you do. Be in that place of coaching but be responsible.» That’s what you’re saying. It’s like, «Show up and help people with what you know what your skillset is, not what the latest fad is whether you have the skills or not.» That’s what we’re seeing in a lot of it.
There’s a responsibility in being an advisor, coach and helper. K.C. and I are saying, «Step up to that responsibility and honor it because it is an honor to be an advisor to someone. It’s not something that you get to just make money out of.» First of all, if someone were to want to work with you, what would their experience be like? What is their journey?
The program that I have developed from my years of experience is called The Soulprint Method™. It is harnessing the yin and the yang, those feminine and masculine qualities inside of us and getting them in balance so we can be in alignment. The cool thing is it’s optimizing your life so you can scale a soul-aligned business. It has this mashup of qualities that land in the line of habits, goal-forming, accountability, clarity and core values but there’s also that piece of, «Where do we implement this? How is it going to show up and benefit me in the line of work that I’m in?»
Soul Aligned Business: We can throw strategies all day long, but if we have something that says we can’t or we’re not good enough constantly running on an autoloop, we’re not going to get anywhere.
I typically work with people for 6 months to 1 year. It’s how we kick it off. It’s very similar to probably the style that you do where it’s no bars held because of Zoom. You can coach someone all around the world, which is awesome. The pieces are unfolded in layers. We start with mindset because the mindset is the most powerful thing and also the thing that holds us back, the limiting belief and the shoulds. All the different pieces from our childhood, society and maybe our own negative self-talk have limited us in some way.
We’re going to look under the hood there first because I didn’t do this in the beginning part of my business coaching. Back to what I was saying to you before, I’m always thinking about, «What’s a better way? What’s needed now?» I started to see, «Even though these are cutting-edge business strategies, I’m not seeing the results that I want for my clients. What is missing? What is that chunky piece that’s not getting them from point A to point B?» I started deep-diving, listening and researching.
I was like, «It’s the mindset piece. That is the piece. I can throw strategies at you all day long but if you have something that’s telling you, ‘You can’t. You’re not good enough. You’re resistant to receiving. There’s some type of money mindset blocks going in there,’ from whatever the story is that’s running constantly on an auto-loop, we’re not going to get anywhere no matter what kind of strategies we put into place.
That has now become an exciting starting point. Not a, «By the way, here are a couple of affirmations to help you start your day,» but like, «We’re going to get into this. Are you ready to do the work with me? We’re going to go deep. I’m going to be here for you the whole way but before we even start talking about business foundations, that has become one of the first pillars when you work with me.»
It is what unlocks everything. I always ask this question. What is a book we all must read?
What I’m loving is Think Like a Monk from Jay Shetty. I would recommend that you listen to it on Audible because it is read by the author. He has a delicious accent and you hear his passion. It doesn’t seem like he is reading his book. It’s like you’re a friend and he is telling you the story of his life. It’s a beautiful journey. I aligned with his values of knowing your Dharma, your life’s purpose and then leaning into your personal strengths. I’m on the same page and I highly recommend that.
K.C., where can people find you?
They can head to KcRossi.com. I also have a three-part free video series if they’re digging some of the topics that we’ve started chatting about on the show. They can grab that at KcRossi.com/lead.
We only want to teach what we know and what we experience, not what we’ve learned.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me to explore some of these concepts. Thank you for doing the work that you do. People need you.
Thank you so much. It has been a pleasure, Dolores.
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I loved my conversation with K.C. Rossi. Part of the things that I love the most is this yin and yang conversation that she talks about so much around alignment, intuition, self-leadership and honoring your soul’s journey while bringing in systems and strategies. We think very much alike in that sense but the importance of having the rhythm of a business while being aligned with your soul purpose.
She talks about one of the books that she recommends and she is passionate about. It’s called Think Like a Monk. She suggested that we download it in Audible. If you haven’t read this episode, go ahead and read it because of some great gifts of insight in this conversation with K.C. around alignment, intuition and our soul’s journey within the scope of a scalable, profitable and impactful business.
Important Links:
- The Soulprint Method™
- Think Like a Monk
- KcRossi.com
- KcRossi.com/lead
- Audible – Think Like a Monk
- KC@KCRossi.com
- https://www.Facebook.com/KcRossiInc/
- https://www.Instagram.com/my.coach.kc/
- https://www.Pinterest.com/mycoachkc/pins/
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/kcrossi
About K.C. Rossi
K.C. Rossi is a Mindset and Self-Leadership Coach and has been an entrepreneur for 30 years. She jokes that business is in her DNA as she now helps holistic entrepreneurs scale a profitable and soul-aligned business without burning out.
An entrepreneur since she was 10 years old and have been on a continuous improvement quest ever since.
Do you know that a slight change in your thoughts causes an immediate response in your skeletal alignment? Listening to your body gives you clarity and helps you regain balance. Dolores Hirschmann’s guest today is Laura Donnelly, founder of Dancing with Ease. In this episode, Laura explains the body-brain-business balance. When you listen to your body, you understand your thoughts. When you understand your thoughts, you’re better able to respond from an energy of possibility. Tune in and discover the simple process of listening to your body!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here:
Dancing With Ease: How Listening To Your Body Gives You Clarity And Helps You Regain Balance With Laura Donnelly
Laura, I am excited to have this conversation. As we start everything here in this show, tell us a little bit about your clarity journey. Have you always been this clear about the work you do and if not, how did this come about?
They have come together in a wonderful way. Very strangely, the intensity of the COVID times gave me the opportunity to look at the collection of things that I have done and learned over my life. How these fit together and create an all-encompassing way for people to work with themselves, and to heal things that have been problems in their life for a long time. I started out as a dancer and I did a whole lot of bodywork, performing and training. I was mostly ballet and a modern dancer in terms of concert stuff. I did a whole bunch of historical dancing, and then I started to choreograph to make my own dances. It caused me to work with all kinds of different people like musicians, set designers and costume designers. It expanded my ability to communicate but also this idea of collaboration, and how you create things with another person in conversation with another person that you wouldn’t make by yourself.
This is a big element of the work that I teach, which I call body-brain business balance. It’s a lot of different things, but our human-self unites all these things. We have emotions, physical bodies, dreams, aspirations, and millions of thoughts every day. All of these, when we bring them together in one place, and then when we share with another person from an authentic center, we create connection, growth and healing. That was wonderful for me to figure out that I didn’t have to stop being a dancer, a mover and a creator to help people on a healing journey that it’s all combined. I was super happy.
There are a couple of things here. In these conversations that I always have, I love asking this question because my readers are in some part of the journey that I am or my guests are. What I’m hearing is that it’s almost a requirement to go on this clarity journey and arrived in a safe harbor where you’re doing what you love and you’re having an impact. It’s the requirement of open-mindedness and an open heart. There’s a process which you shared about the role and the journey of being a dancer, where it was all about your move as dictated by a plan that the choreographer or whoever was in charge of the overall performance. You were one player in that performance, and there was perfection needed in your performance.
Also, there was a plan that was not yours. It’s part of what we do. We’re going to talk about perfection, but in the journey of you embracing your own movement and dance under the supervision and plan of others, to then shifting to moving beyond that, to owning and leading the moves as a choreographer, and becoming one voice in a collaboration of voices that make a performance. As a choreographer, you’re working with a production team on the stage and all the players that come together. Now you’re co-creating a performance versus being someone following someone’s rules.
When you work with other people, you have to listen to other ideas and you have to be open.
The analogy that you’re bringing in, that led you to the path of bringing healing as you help someone collaborating their own internal elements. We all have inside of us performers, choreographers and costume designers. All of us are inside of ourselves as well. Talk to me about this permission or journey of opening your heart and your mind beyond that dancer’s perfect move and seeking that perfection to seeking the liberation of creation. Creation has no perfection in it because it’s messy, fun and vibrant.
It’s interesting in terms of a journey because I think that all of the things that I learned affecting a type of performance gave me skills. It helped me learn to analyze and to move exactly in time with another group of people. The negative side of this was I learned to be hyper-critical, “This wasn’t good enough. That wasn’t good enough.” This is the truth. You’re either on the beat or you’re not on the beat. There is a definite black and white thing. I internalized a lot of that. I discovered it was making me more tense and more bound energetically in my body. Since what I needed to do with my work as a dancer or a choreographer was my body, this tension I was putting on myself to be a perfect size or whatever it was that I thought I wasn’t because that’s a place where our thoughts come in and that self-critical piece. I think I’m still working on this. How do you get better at what you do without beating yourself up for what you don’t know how to do yet? I think that is a lifelong journey of healing.
It’s a lifelong dance.
Yes, it’s a dance and there are lots of steps to it. Starting to collaborate when you make your own thing and you do your own thing, you have control because it’s you or you think you have control. It’s more like that. When you start to work with other people, you have to listen to other ideas, you have to be open. This openness is the antithesis of perfection. Perfection is a specific thing. This is perfect. Everything outside of this is not perfect. That’s limited and limiting. When somebody says an idea and you’re like, “I never thought of that but that’s cool” or in the dance studio sometimes, I would make a problem and I would have an idea of the solution like a movement problem.
I would set my dancer and I say, «Here’s the problem. Let me see how you solve this with movement with your bodies.» Their bodies are different from my body. Suddenly, they would come up with stuff I had never imagined. That was interesting inside. If I had the rule that I had to make every step, then I have eliminated all of those co-creations that came out of the time, the place, and the sharing of all of us in the studio. That was the beginning of unraveling this. I did 3 or 4 years’ worth of improvisational performances where I would work with a musician who was improvising and I was improvising movement. We had a starting place and an ending place, but we had nothing in between. He was a brilliant person, a wonderful composer, musician and visual artist. His name is Philip Corner. He said, “We’re going to do this and we are going to perform these live for an audience but we are going to practice every day for two months with no audience, then we will bring up a small trusted people into the studio.”
Listening To Your Body: The COVID pandemic allowed us to examine our accomplishments and learnings.
This was permission to make a mess of things. We weren’t doing this the very first time for a ticketed audience where we had to have certain goodness. We were just communicating. For me, this is a big part. You mentioned that communication of the parts of ourselves with each other in ourselves is the micro version of the macro version of how we work in the world. Working with Philip, we gave ourselves the time to explore, to buy all kinds of things that we might not have tried in front of an audience with hesitancy.
We got a huge vocabulary of possible options so that when we did go live, we still had a beginning and an end and nothing in the middle, but we knew that we would come up with something good because we had come up with something interesting several times. Bringing that back, that trust in not knowing is a huge step in unraveling perfectionism. That perfectionism comes from a desire to do our very best. I don’t think it starts from a rigid and bound place. It gets rigid and bound often as people misinterpret what perfect is.
I know those many layers can also sometimes come from fear or the consequence of imperfection. Everybody has different journeys and this perfection-seeking for our self-worth place, as a perfection-seeking from a safe place, depending on people’s past experiences. Let’s talk about this journey and I’m fascinated. I was a tap dancer, never professional, but I understand the language and the art of dance and the process of recreating with our bodies someone else’s vision. A dancer led by another choreographer, you’re interpreting an intention from others. Depending on that choreographer’s way of communicating, it could be a beautiful process or a very painful process. If someone doesn’t communicate properly and they have a way of imagining with a performance in their head, and when you, the dancer, show up to interpret it and not exactly what that person thought off, sometimes that can be tricky.
We translate all this conversation to your work because I think there are a lot of elements in the work that you do on helping people manage their own emotions, their body connection, and balancing stress. All of these are things and experiences you had in your life as a ballerina, and that you now are translating your insights into helping everybody, not just about arenas. Who are the people you love to work with? If our audience is reading, I want to make sure that they can identify that they are the people that should call you.
The people I love to work with are people who know things can be better. They usually are passionate and strong-willed. They are dedicated to improving themselves, their lives, their families but somehow it’s not working. The harder they try to make things better, the more things feel off, out of balance and out of sync. Those people are banging up against the wall of their desire to be a better mom, wife, businessperson, and they don’t know how to do it. The work I teach about balance and coming into balance with your body and your brain is to admit this. You talked about fear being a driver of perfectionism. It is when things don’t work right.
Perfectionism comes from a desire to do our very best.
We usually do what used to work in the past more and faster and harder. We forget that this isn’t the quest. This is right now. It’s like an improvisational dance. What we need right now is different from even our most successful thing from the past. The people I like to work with are curious. They’re frustrated because things aren’t working, but they know that things can work. They’re like, «How could I make this work? There’s got to be an answer.” There is an answer because that’s what I have as an answer. We then start a journey of observing our thoughts.
Let’s talk about that. If I say, “Laura, I want to work with you.” Walk me through what happened from the moment you and I connect to the next moment.
I would say, “It’s great to talk to you. I’m so excited to meet you and to explore what kind of journey we might go on together. We can think about this as a trip or a creation journey. We are going to make a project together because it’s a collaborative journey. Tell me a little bit about what’s going on in your life. What are a couple of things going well and what are some things that aren’t going so well for you? If you would tell me those things, we will celebrate the things that are going well. I will say, “Let me know how you felt when you tell me those things.”
Even now when you’re thinking about some things that are going well and even if I say to you, “What are some things that aren’t going so well? Your smile slightly goes away. The whole body a little bit pulls in. That is pulling out. It’s our body sharing with us that it feels better when we think about the things that are going well. It doesn’t feel as good. Energetically, it doesn’t move as well when we think about what’s not going well. Our whole life is built on identifying what’s not working and trying to fix it. If you start with what’s not working, you already start with that baseline tension.
Part of the work I do with people is to say, “We want to work on opening up this thing that’s not going so well and that’s cool,” but we’re going to leave it over here on the side for a minute. We’re going to come back to what’s going well for you. What’s something that makes you feel happy or joyful? Something as silly as you made fried eggs and you didn’t break any yolks when you turned them over. We get a few more simple wins and then we circle back to this thing that we might want to do differently. We circle from this energy of possibility instead of the energy of, “This isn’t going well and I have to fix it.” That slightly larger focus puts this thing in balance for one thing because some things are going well. This certainly is not so big. Our mind is in a more open and creative space and that’s a simple way with a simple issue, but it works on deep emotional issues. It works on creative blocks. The process is the same. It’s just what you apply it to.
Listening To Your Body: If you start with what’s not working, you’ll encounter an immediate baseline tension.
It sounds like what you do is you help your people and your clients get into that intuitive flow, which is at the core of every good dancer. There’s the choreography and then there is your throughline of movement. I’m understanding that you help your clients reconnect. Sometimes connecting for the first time was the throughline of intuition, which is also the throughline of our creation, our movement and our soul.
It’s so lovely to hear you say this.
Most of the people I work with, most of the guests I have in my show are people who have turned their passion and purpose into their life’s work. Sometimes even throw in there their pain because if the pain is part of the purpose and passion, it’s definitely part of the past. We give ourselves permission to integrate it all with a shared purpose for bringing forth our life’s work to have an impact. The beauty of people like us in the work that we do is we serve, in many cases, with our past pain.
That desire to be better was the thing that set me on the path of learning and I wanted to dance better. I started to not just take technique classes, but to take the Alexander technique. To learn how I’m thinking either helped me dance better, get into that zone of flow and movement or you can imagine doing the wrong step right now. From that slightly frozen place, it’s twice as hard to move. That’s part of where I started with, “My body is so responsive to my thoughts on every level. I did a lot of somatic work, craniosacral work, and movement fundamentals. How does the body communicate with us?
The body has its own language. A lot of times the language is mysterious to us, but pain is one of the key messages that comes from the body. It is a sign that things are out of balance. The simple thing is if you eat something and you have a stomach ache, that’s a sign that your body doesn’t find that food to be nourishing. That’s a fairly simple message. If your feet start to hurt, that’s a sign to look at what you’re doing. How are your shoes? Maybe your shoes are worn out. Maybe you forgot to check and you wore the heels down. You’re walking funny and this is making your feet or your back hurt.
Focus on the energy of possibility instead of the energy of “this isn’t going well, I have to fix it.”
A lot of times people are like, “Pain is bad. I want to get rid of it.” I’m like, “Pain is a messenger.” It’s bringing you information. People think pain is one thing. I say, “Maybe your pain is trying to tell you something. If you ask your pain, what it’s trying to tell you? Suddenly, the pain softens because the reason it’s and loud is you’re not listening to it. It’s like a person when somebody doesn’t listen to you. He said it again and again, and louder and louder.
Do you work with people through conversation or there’s movement integrated into your work as well?
Honest and truly, it’s total improvisation. It could be either, both, none or maybe people want to journal. It’s what comes up on the person. I do a lot of work online because I’m in Kansas. I’m far from everybody but through the internet, I can connect to everyone. We start and then we are making like a dance. Body-brain business balance is what you get. The process is dancing with ease. The ease is this energy in yourself. This awareness that we all have but we forget it a lot of times of that flow, inspiration, creativity and not just being right where you’re supposed to be and enough right now.
Let me ask you a question. In 2021, we’ve finished a hefty dancing year. What are you most excited about in the next few months?
One of the things that became important for me during the whole strange and interesting times of COVID is people were like, “This is a bad day. This is terrible.” I’m like, “Okay, it’s not cool. I’m down with this. This is not my first choice of things to have happened. What if we look at it through the lens of very strange and interesting? What happens to all the things?” I ended up doing 230 conversations online about strange and interesting times. Whatever came up from COVID sometimes, my audience members would write things in that were bothering them. I would say, “This is not perfect. It’s not great, but what if you look at it differently?”
Listening To Your Body: Pain is a sign that things are out of balance.
One of the things I realized is how damaging fear is for everybody, the emotion of fear. I’ll talk to you like I do not know what work does, but I think that’s a part of the process of clarity. By doing things as I did with my composer friend, Philip, by doing our improvisation, we revealed to ourselves what the improvisation was. That is the same that happened to me. By doing these conversations and changing the perspective on things, I realized how powerful that is and how that is a choice everybody can make at any moment. They have the ability to make the choice to say, “How is my thinking of whatever I’m thinking about affecting me? Is how I’m thinking making me feel tight, confined, constricted and angry?” You can hear it in my voice right away even when I say those words. I come back to myself and then my voice changes all by itself.
I then say, “Now I feel differently.” What did I do? I stopped thinking about constriction. I didn’t think the opposite, expansion or anything. I just said, “This thought is causing me pain.” I’m going to listen to my body tell me that this thought is causing me pain. I’m going to make a different choice. That choice changes everything. It’s how my body feels, how I lean forward or back from the screen, the pitch and speed of my voice. I’m like, “This will help people in all areas of their life to choose acquaintance that brings ease in yourself.” Suddenly your body’s like, “Yes, we’ve been calling you. We’ve been telling you this.” Your body suddenly is happy. You’re like, “That’s so easy.”
At the same time, the reason I work with people is because it’s hard to remember at the moment. You get so caught up in the moment of what’s happening. Let me see if I can do something quick and think of an example. After we finish the interview, I have a thing to write and it’s big and important. I’m suddenly gone to what’s going to happen after this. I realized that and I hear the voice in my ear. I say, “I don’t have to worry about that. It’s not here yet.”
Subtle changes in your thoughts also change your skeletal alignment.
It’s not at the moment. That’s the beauty of improv in general. This whole series of conversations you’ve been having and this thing you’re tapping into, as far as helping people be so aware of what’s here, what’s now, what is that thought? To choose a different thought is partial. Let me ask you a question. If you were to invite our audience to take one action, what action would you invite our readers to take right now?
This is funny but I’m going to ask them to do a little experiment so that they have some immediate feedback from their body. They can start going forward to steer the messages from their body a little bit more clearly. This action is to take one hand and make a fist and squeeze it tighter and tighter, and see what you feel. Did you hear my voice? It’s so funny, and then stop squeezing. That is that choice. That’s that thing. That tightness, I could feel it in my voice. All my arm muscles were tightened. Your body will tell you different things about squeezing that fist. When you stop squeezing, that’s that instant decision of release and not continuing down the path of increasing the tension in your system.
Make that fist, be aware of that tension and then release and feel the release. That is true whether you’re holding your fist, your thought, your anger or your pain tight. Wherever it is that you’re holding tight, just test. What does it feel like to release it? Thank you, Laura, for that simple but powerful metaphor and exercise at the same time. One more question, if there’s one book we must read, what is that book? One of the things you mentioned that you and I discussed was the Body Awareness In Action, which I think he changed the name to Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones.
Freedom to Change: The Development and Science of the Alexander Technique
For me, that was a profound-looking book. I’ve read it early. I was probably still in my late 20s. It was both scientific like, “Why the changing happens?” We experienced this with the fist, but the other thing that happens is when we have tension in our system or have fear, the back of the neck collapses and it interferes with everything, breathing, moving and speaking. That guy was amazing. He did this early before there were computers. He has x-rays and all kinds of things that show the human body, which was my passion. He gives proof as to how something so subtle as changing your thinking changes your skeletal alignment and your physical posture. This freedom to change is everyone’s choice to stop squeezing. You don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to stretch. You don’t have to sit up. You don’t have to do anything differently. Just stop that one thing.
Where should people find you if they want to work, release and find balance with you?
I am at DancingWithEase.com. They can email me Laura@DancingWithEase.com or go to my website. I have a couple of little free gifts they could sign up for.
Laura, thank you so much for your time. Any parting words you want to share with us?
Enjoy.
It can also translate to “in joy,” stay in joy and the joy of that flow that we were talking about. Thank you, Laura, for taking the time to be with us. I will check out your website and learn more about your work because I think it’s fascinating, your journey and the work you do. Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure and a joy to speak with you.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- Freedom to Change
- DancingWithEase.com
- Laura@DancingWithEase.com
- https://DancingWithEase.com/the-healing-path/
- https://www.Facebook.com/Laura.D.Donnelly/
- https://www.Instagram.com/donnelly632/
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/lauraddonnelly/
- https://DancingWithEase.com/AT-EaseTV
- Body Awareness In Action
About Laura Donnelly
Laura Donnelly is a teacher, mentor, choreographer, dancer, and writer. She has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe as a professional dancer, and she currently teaches Dancing with Ease: Body-Brain Balance, a process to improve communication in life and work, based on her 35 years as a performer.