What it Looks Like to Do the Inner Work and Build Your Body Work

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

*Currently editing

Hey, hey, Michelle here and I am going to keep my voice down because it is early, my kids are sleeping, and I don't want to wake them up.

But I really wanted to come on and talk about something that is very important, I believe, and it is around building your body of work.

And I want to explain what that means, why it's important, and why I think it's really at the foundation of how we as women are going to create lives that serve us.

And let's just dive right in.

So what do I mean by building your body of work?

I mean jumping in to just creating whatever you want to create, have a practice.

Aimee, my joint venture business partner, calls it “having a daily creative practice.”

And for me, what that looks like, is creating anything in business period, anything that I want to take from my head and bring to life in my business.

And I'm specifically focusing on business because I want to focus on building your body of work in terms of creating revenue.

Because yes, I believe we should do things that have nothing to do with money.

But for a lot of us the presser around money keeps us from being able to do things that are just for fun.

So I want to help woman solve that piece around money.

Because a lot of the ways that we go about trying to make money actually pushes it away from us.

Even in in business, the way that people are taught to build their businesses… I don't think it really helps you with how the process actually would naturally be for you.

If you honoured yourself in the process.

A lot of the times we honour other people's roadmaps, perspectives, game plans, frameworks, blueprints, checklists, and we don't honour ourselves.

And I think that that is what keeps us from building our body of work, creating things that can be out in the marketplace, evolving, improving, making money, attracting people, helping us get better at what we're, we're all about and how we're selling it and how we're doing it, how we're teaching it, how we're evolving it.

We never actually go on that journey as much as we, we could, because we are stuck trying to force our creativity into a linear process.

And that's because when a lot of people become quote, unquote, successful, they want to turn around and say, “Oh, let me just tell you exactly how I did it, and if you do exactly what I did, you'll get exactly what I got.”

And there are certain pieces to that that are helpful.

They do you have insights, epiphanies that would be helpful to someone who isn't where they are.

However, we have to be conscious of the fact that there are things that we need to learn that can only come from embracing the messiness and the organic process of the journey.

And trying to skip over all of that and just go straight into well, if I only just do steps, 123, ABC, then I'll get XYZ, we miss all of that inner work, all of that inner growth.

And unless you do that inner work, your success is not going to be sustainable, because you might be like, well, I picked the perfect product. I picked the perfect niche. I picked the perfect marketing strategy, I picked the perfect platform for social media. I got all the things right and maybe you do actually make money maybe you do “find a need in the marketplace and create the product to solve people's problems” and maybe you do actually make money.

But it's not sustainable.

Because your life and your business is always going to be a reflection of who you are on the inside - of your, the level of inner work that you've done, how big you are as a person on the inside.

And a lot of the programmes and courses and gurus and experts out there, they teach stuff in a way that makes you think without even realising it makes you think, “Oh, I can just bypass all of that in our work, I can just do this the easy, quick way and not have to do this the long, hard way.”

But what people really should be doing if they want to help you, is help you find peace and joy, and pleasure and enjoyment and love and fulfillment and deliciousness in doing things that are harder and longer.

Because that is life, we don't get to just redefine life, life is always going to be a mixture of easy and hard and long and difficult and, and the more that we can embrace when things are hard, the more we can create space for ease.

The more we can embrace sadness, the deeper we can feel joy.

And a lot of the programmes are that are out there want to tell you what you want to hear, which is, “You don't have to do this the long way; I can give you the shortcuts; you don't have to suffer.”

And then we sign up and life is still life.

We still have to grow as people, we still have childhood trauma that is holding us back. We still have unresolved issues, at home and in life and in family and we still have health problems, we still have things that are hard.

And that's why I say business is my playground. Because compared to life, business is a piece of cake.

Life is hard.

Even now, just even this year, I had to deal with things where it's like, “Really? I have to still do hard stuff in my life?" It doesn't get to just go away because my business grows bigger?”

Yeah. You will never get to a point in life where things just start getting easy, there are always going to be hard, difficult and challenging things that come up.

And what the only thing that changes is you can't seems the fact that life is hard, you can't change that coronavirus is happening.

People are suffering and dying and people out there are in pain and not enough food and like you let can't deny that and in my dealing be affecting you personally.

And no matter how much money you have, you're going to have the scope like no matter how much money there is in the world, there is still going to be painful things that happen.

Even if everyone has money, there's still going to be painful things that happen.

And the only thing that is going to make a difference there is not somehow pretending that hard stuff in life doesn’t exist. The only thing that really makes a difference in your experience is you becoming a bigger person so that when something hard happens, you are not worse for it.

You can actually become bigger than your challenges. You can become someone who doesn't see challenges as just hard or painful things. You kind of redefine it.

You don't redefine the fact that this exists in the world but you redefine how it affects you. you redefine whether or not it means that you're going to have a bad day.

You can say okay, this is happening. I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to work on myself work on my mind to step into the challenge and deal with it versus says someone who never does that inner work and thinks that things are supposed to be easy and just a checklist, roadmap to success, they're never able to have that space with their name, that they're never equipped to use those challenges or stepping stones to use those problems and obstacles as opportunities for growth.

And so how does all of this relate to building your body of work?

I think that when we really embrace all of what life really is, and we decide that we are going to create from that place, instead of thinking, well, I need life to be easy, I need things to be, you know, life to look a certain way. And then I'm going to be able to build my business in a certain way and create my products in a certain way.

And by certain way, I mean, “I want to identify exactly what I'm going to do. And I'm going to have an audience about this and a product about that.”

Like we're trying to take out all the messiness. But if we embrace the messiness, in life, and business, and we see that the messiness is absolutely there, that's the real work, that's the opportunity for us to do the inner work to become bigger people.

Because the goal is not to just make stuff, the goal is to become bigger people. And from that place, what we create, what we make, is going to be our work.

So it's never going to be you sitting down and reverse engineering everything and then making something and you're done.

Your body of work is something that evolves with you.

And if you're not evolving, your body of work is not evolving.

And when I speak of body of work, I'm thinking of something that is constantly evolving, something that's getting better and better and better and better.

And that is how your business, or at least my business, that is how my business keeps growing is I just keep working on my body of work, I keep expanding it, I keep evolving it, every single product I have in my business, it started out with something that was super simple, my ultimate life binder that I created to take responsibility for my life 10 years ago, and I've just been evolving that thing like crazy, it is at the centre of every single product that I sell.

And I would never have had the insight to do all of that. evolving, and rehashing and distilling and creating and improving, if I was not doing that work on myself.

And this is what I mean is we have to honour ourselves in this process. And when we know that the most important thing we should be working on is ourselves, then we get to work. Versus “Well, I just I need to figure out how to do it. I don't know what I'm going to sell. I don't know who my mix is, I don't know how to create blah, blah.”

And we don't take advantage of the moment we don't step into the messiness and create something now.

We think everything's supposed to look a certain way that we're supposed to feel a certain way that it's supposed to be a certain way before we can even do XYZ.

And even now it's like it's 6:30 in the morning. And I'm doing like this is a perfect example. Right now I'm creating my body of work this podcast, it's a part of my body of work. And this is a perfect example because right now I'm sitting here in my pyjamas, it's 6:30 in the morning, I'm talking into my Apple headphones.

It's not even a fancy mic. I'm using a random online website for voice recording. I'm not doing any editing, I'm not doing any intro or outro. I'm not sending it to my podcast editor to take out the and the background noise if there happens to be any blah, blah, blah.

All that stuff that people say this is what it means to make a podcast.

And it doesn't come with the disclaimer Have, it's all optional, you don't have to do the million of things that people say you need to do. Because at the end of the day, the most important thing is a body of work, not your body of edited, curated, filtered work. It's just the purest form of you, being you in this moment in the messiness, and letting that be enough. And yes, it can get better and better, you can add more bells and whistles, you can improve the quality you can hire to help. But the fact that there's this pressure to start that way, is exactly what's keeping you from starting now. And if you don't start now in the messiness, then you completely miss that the most important part of this process is who you're becoming, and who you're becoming to, to evolve authentically, and I'm not using that as a buzzword, but to evolve authentically, if there's something inside of you, that is not okay with just sewing up as you are, then you're not actually becoming, you're just, you're just pretending. And until you become comfortable with just being you and making that enough, then there's a huge piece of inner work that is missing Eve, I don't care if you're a multi, multi, multi millionaire, if you don't have it inside of you to just be like, Yeah, I'm going to create XYZ, and it's not going to be fancy, it's not going to be edited, it's not going to have those in whistles, it's not going to be perfectly branded, but it is valuable just as it is. And I can put it out there and add it to my body of work. If that permission slip is not inside of you, then something really important is needing to be done still. And if people who are teaching you never gave themselves that permission slip, and they always held themselves to a level of perfection, then what they're really doing when they teach is they're passing on that. That trauma response to you. They are acting from a state they're acting from a level of I'm not enough just as I am. And they're teaching you that you're not enough just as you are even if they don't mean to. So we have a lot of people who don't feel like they're enough teaching other people who don't feel like they're enough to continue to act like they're not enough. So at the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for your own inner work. Because whenever you go out there to learn from anybody, you need to have that filter of I am enough. Because to just accept anything everyone tells you, anyone tells you is to absorb their lack of doing the inner work. And yeah, if they're not giving you permission to just start exactly as you are, without all the reverse engineered nonsense, then there's something wrong there. Because when I look at everything I've created, it didn't come from figuring it all out. I started with super simple stuff, like and I just kept making it better and better and better as I got better and better and better. And I wish women gave themselves permission, you can start building your body of work now. Because I think it's so sad when I talked to a woman and he wants to do this. He wants to build a business. He wants to create freedom, he wants to make money. And a year, two years, three years will go by still hasn't created anything. She's hasn't made a single podcast episode. He hasn't done a single tutorial or YouTube video or anything. And it's all because he thinks that it's supposed to be a certain way. And your body of work is your body of work period. It needs to just start being created and then you get to evolve it Make it better. But it's like we go into online business. And then we start learning business from people who have businesses, and then we can't make a business because we're so bombarded with all the business tips. It's so sad. Because that amount of time is precious, like the amount of things you can do within a year of just doing something every single day. Not learning something, not picking up a book or watching a course, but actually creating something every single day, every day, listening to your intuition and asking your inner child what do we want to make today? Do we want to make a podcast? Do we want to make a YouTube video? Do we want to make a printable? Do we want to make a planner and the business world will tell you you're you are suffering from slimy object syndrome? You need to get focused, you don't even know who your customer is. You don't even know what platform to use. Did you know Did you identify if your ideal customer is even on that platform you're using you need to go to where your people are into. And then you get paralysed because you're so afraid, because you think that there's a right way and a wrong way. And that success is supposed to be linear. It's like it's ridiculous. The same people that say, oh, success is not linear. Look, it's a really messy process. They're going to also turn around be like okay, now you got to do this, this, this, this, this and this as if success is linear. But when it comes to creativity, it is not linear, it is messy. It is wild, the way creativity works, which creativity is your superpower. By the way, you cannot succeed in business, if you don't use your creativity. And most of us are taught to use it at a very, very small amount. And that's the problem, we're not being given the space to use it in its fullest expression. And creativity does not follow a roadmap doesn't follow a blueprint doesn't follow a framework doesn't follow a step by step process. Creativity has no rules. So what I really am trying to say here is trying to do this, according to a rule book is killing your creativity. When I look at what I have done, it was not from following rules. It was not from listening to gurus, it was not from checking off a checklist. It was from just doing what I wanted to do posting where I wanted to post creating what I wanted to create. Like for instance, I didn't start using Pinterest because oh people who I want to sell to are on Pinterest, I use Pinterest because I like using Pinterest. Today I use Instagram because I like using Instagram. I sold my planner on Etsy because I like selling my planner on Etsy I create courses because I like creating courses and I create courses about about stuff I want to create stuff about, like this is all driven by desire. This is not driven. For me, this is not driven, driven by market research, asking what my audience wants. Because I'm not a machine. I'm a human being. And I'm not here. I'm not here to be a solution to your problem. And that's what business major online business stuff typically tells you is you got to go out there and solve your audience's problem. But I think there's another way and that's the way I've been doing is I get I believe that I can just do what I want to do make what I want to make, attract who I want to attract. And let people say thank you in the form of money. That's it. That's all I do. And that gives me so much space to just create every single day to build my body of work every single day to create my intellectual property every single day. And I wish more women gave themselves permission to do that because your body of work that you're not building right now because you're so afraid of doing anything wrong. Your body of work is your ticket to the life you desire because that is how you're going to to honour the fact that you have something inside of you that just by expressing it brings life to other people, just by you saying whatever you want to say, brings light to other people. Not Well, let me go look at what people are saying. And if it's in my niche, I'll just repeat it back to them. And then maybe they'll think that I'm reading their minds because I levelled. Like, oh my god, can we just? Can you see what I mean? Like? Why not just say what you want to say? Why not do that inner work to dig in deep enough to what you really, really believe? What is your opinion on things, what is really, really coming from your heart, and you just say that. Like, I know that all of these tips have their place, but they will never replace you. And so much of this business advice out there is just erasing you. And if you can't get strong in who you really are, and do that inner work to just love, love this journey with all of its ups and downs and message messiness. And I don't even think of it as ups and downs. It's just life period. It's just life. It's not even Oh, I'm on the roller coaster, it's just life. Life is supposed to be like this. And when we can really step into that, then you can get up at 630 in the morning, and record a podcast in your pyjamas, and press publish and let it bring value to people's lives. Without wondering, oh my gosh, should I have edited it? But will people think should I have asked people what they would what I should have talked about, instead of just talking about what I talked about, instead, I create an outline and a call to action first, should I sit up, I have created a freebie so that people have something to sign up for after they can you see how this all gets in the way of building your body of work, you have total permission. And you can do all of that extra stuff. If you want to. That's the thing if you want to. But if I'm for me right now, in this moment, I don't want to all I want to do is, say my opinion into a microphone, press record, publish it. That's it. That's all I want to do. And the process of doing what I want to do over and over and over again. You guys I have so much stuff I can play with I create. It's like I'm creating toys, like this podcast is just another toy. And I created all of these toys, all of these puzzle pieces. And all of these building blocks. And I can I have a castle, I have a playground, because I just create something every single day practically. And it's, I can't tell you how powerful that is. I haven't held myself hostage to anyone's top 10 tips. And I want more women to build their body of work to create intellectual property, to see the value in just the stuff that's already coming out of their mouths anyway, when they're speaking truthfully and honestly. And from that place, I know that you can create castles, you can create amazing experiences, just from you doing what you desire in this moment in this messiness in this world in the real world. Just from you doing what you want to do is actually all that is necessary. Like that, is it you doing what you desire is your ticket. You doing what you desire, even if other people say that's totally the wrong way to do it is your ticket. Your ticket to having the life you desire. Like you can have that in this moment. Just by saying that you're going to do what you want to do. And that's what we miss shout on when we think that to create success, we have to do things we don't want to do. And isn't that like six bit like the dominant message like, you just got to put in your time of all the crap you don't want to do. And if you do it long enough and hard enough, you're going to get the life you want. I want to say you're not going to create the life you want doing crap you don't want to do. Because even if you create a life that looks really nice on the outside, on the inside, you're a woman who has denied her desires. And you're looking at everything that you've made, and achieved. And you realise that without that inner work of giving yourself permission to be enough as you are, regardless of what life looks like, on the outside. You don't actually have the life you want. Because to have the life you want, that you truly, truly want. It has to come from being the reflection of being the person you want to be and the person we all want to be as someone who does what she wants to do. Not someone who does what she hates doing so that she can make money. No one will actually want that. But then we just start doing that because we think that's the only way but it's not the only way. So I hope this rambling podcast said some light and I'm going to go do what I want to do. I hope you do too. Have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai