111. SPIRITUAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: Chat with Kat - Pivoting When Business Grinds to a Halt

Last year, my business ground to a halt for seemingly no explainable reason. This led to me venturing on a journey to explore relational health and safety with my business.  This episode isn't about the financial rebound, but instead the spiritual truths that emerged from that challenging period. I'll unpack the profound lessons from this contraction, the deepening belief that business is a spiritual practice and how everything is intrinsically relational. Not only that, but I'll also share how our businesses, like our bodies, whisper, and sometimes scream for our attention through signs and symptoms.
 
 Imagine the power of being in a co-creative relationship to the entities in your life - your clients, your business, even your fears. In this episode, we journey together, exploring the transformative power of surrender in both business and personal life. I reveal the challenges of self-validation, the fear of disappointing those I love, and how this tight rope walk between love and fear led to a stronger connection with my business and myself. We'll delve into the heart of surrender as an expression of love and trust, and how it opened up unanticipated paths to co-create something magical with my business. 

Kat HoSoo Lee is a trauma-informed Spiritual Business Mentor and host of The Rooted Business Podcast. She uses the tools of somatic and emotional alchemy to guide soulful entrepreneurs to approach their business as a spiritual practice. This allows them to cultivate businesses that are rooted in conscious values, ethical marketing and purposeful service.

Connect with Kat:

• Book a Free Connection Call
• Business Alchemist Mentorship
• Instagram
• Youtube

This podcast is made possible with sound production by Andre Lagace.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 2:37

Hello and welcome to the Empowered Curiosity podcast. Today is a little bit of a different episode because I'm just coming on here solo, without a guest, and this episode came about because whenever I'm about to share something on my Instagram stories, i like to map it out a little bit like come up with a bit of an outline, so that I have a direction and a flow. As I was outlining this one, i started realizing this is a much bigger share, also a bit of a more tender share, than I think people have capacity for attention span, for time for on social media, and so I thought I would just come into your headphones here. That sounds weird. I thought I would just pop open my mic here in my podcasting studio and nope, that also sounds weird. I thought I would just pop open my mic and just share from the podcast, because I love connecting with you in this way. I also feel called to do more of these types of episodes, maybe a little bit shorter. I'll come on solo and dive into a particular topic, whether it's something that's a bit more of a personal share or perhaps answering a question of yours and so, if this felt resonant for you, if this feels an alignment, or if you have a question that you'd like me to jump on and answer, just shoot me an email. It's over at cat at empowered curiositycom. So today's conversation, i want to talk about insights on when your business hits slow or rough patches, and I'm going to share through the lens of some of the shifts that I needed to integrate when my business came to what felt like a grinding halt last year.

Speaker 1: 4:42

So, for some unexplainable reason, in November of 2022, my business completely dried up. I have I still have no idea why because all the ways in which I had been consistently bringing clients in totally went away. My marketing fell flat with people. My DMs, which is where I usually get to have these like rich conversations with folks, went completely silent. My email open rate also dropped to these like abysmally low numbers And, like I said, i have no idea what happened. I can't really place a singular thing that I did or something within the business structure that went awry. It was. It felt really like kind of unexplainable. Now, i am a human, i have an ego, and so my first reaction which is totally fair and valid I started blaming the algorithm, blame the holidays, blame the economy. In a sense, i really just wanted to place the blame on anything external to myself and my business And, as you can imagine, that doesn't really feel that empowering. It doesn't help me take stock of and make a lot of choices. It doesn't help me take accountability for the things that I need to take accountability for in my business, and so spent a little bit of time in that sort of disempowered sort of space.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Now, before I get too far into this story, i want to share just because I want to make sure that you're in the right room I want to share what this conversation is not. So this is not a story about. This is what I did to get my income back up to 10k plus months. Again. This is also not a story about if I can do it, so can you.

Speaker 1: 6:42

This is how Business is really hard sometimes, and it's actually meant to be hard. If we can accept that and if we can have as much compassion and awareness around this, it can be a good hard that actually pushes you to grow, and what I mean by that specifically is that the contraction in my business invited me to deepen into this belief that I say all the time. I'm sure you've heard me say it Business is a spiritual practice. It made me really step into that and feel it, and what happened is the contraction ended up being a SAV for the core wounds that were asking to be supported within me, and I was able to do some of that work of stitching those wounds together through my business and the invitations it was sending me. I'm also going to be sharing how this contraction reaffirmed how everything is relational, including my business. And again, these are things that I've said and things that I've believed and things that I thought I had deep awareness and connection to, but the contraction helped me get into deeper awareness and deeper understanding of these concepts.

Speaker 1: 8:12

So I want to start with the body, because to me, that's always where it starts. So I often say that the body is the storyteller of your life. I tell you that your body speaks to you through signs and symptoms and it does that because it doesn't have a language other than pain and sensation. And oftentimes those contractions, those feelings, those pains of pain the acute pain, the chronic pain it's all a contraction that's pointing towards something that is pointing towards something that is asking for your attention. And what I learned through this income contraction last November is that my business is not all that different from my body. I mean, if you think about it, how else would my business communicate with me in a way that actually captures my attention? It can't speak to me through words and language, so it's going to speak to me through how many clients are coming in my door, how aligned are those clients to me? how much money is my business? is my saying that again? how much money is in my business bank account? how responsive is my community to my marketing? All of that is information about how my business is feeling. Quick sidebar This is.

Speaker 1: 9:40

I recognize that this sounds a little bit weird, but, yes, i do believe that my business feels. My business, in my experience, is an entity that feels like it has co-creative energy. It wants to be in relationship with me. My business chooses to work with me. I speak to my business like it is a person a lot of times. Specifically, my business and I are on a mission to help spiritual entrepreneurs express their purpose, express their dow through their own businesses in a regenerative way And in a way that doesn't continue to circulate trauma, in a way that is centered around nervous system regulation, and I and my business truly believe that this work ripples out beyond our individual businesses and into the collective.

Speaker 1: 10:27

So going back to this contraction that I was feeling in November, that my business and I were feeling in November. So my business was asking me to tune inwards to some big, important questions, questions that I would not have paid attention to unless it grabbed my attention in a way that's stung. And on this side of it I can see that the clarity of those questions was sitting right there in front of me. But, trust me, when I was in the thick of it it was hard to get through a week without feeling just like sheer panic sometimes. So the three questions that my business was asking me is do you love me unconditionally, do you trust me And do you want to be in a long term relationship with me? So I'm going to unpack each of these questions because I think it's worth talking about. I think it's worth asking your own business these questions and seeing what that response is from your own business. So that first concept unconditional love.

Speaker 1: 11:32

Unconditional love is a core wound of mind And I'm sure it's a resonant one with many of you. My particular flavor of this wound is that I was raised in a family where I was pushed to get all the shiny gold stars, the ace in schools, the violin, solo and orchestra, the college degree, the licenses, and by the time I was 30, i was a very traditionally quote unquote accomplished human. But I also felt hollow and disconnected from my own desires. I was so busy chasing love and approval from others, namely my parents not blaming them, but also naming that. That was the environment that I grew up in, and my parents were responsible for that environment. And I was so busy chasing love and approval from them that I forgot that I was completely deserving of love simply by existing. My business ground to a halt. She stopped performing And she asked me do you still love me? Is this work still worth it if you're not making any money? So my business put this concept of unconditional love to the test And inside let me tell you so many different parts of me rose to the surface.

Speaker 1: 12:53

I have an inner seven year old who over eight because I didn't want to disappoint my grandmother, only to purge that food later. There was a inner 13 year old who didn't audition well and lost the orchestra solo, and I remember at that time. Actually, this is how my mom expresses disappointment now, to this day as well. But she has this like little wrinkle over her eyebrow that I read into it as like a combination of like disappointment and worry And I was so much more concerned and worried about that wrinkle than I was actually about losing that part in the orchestra. I have an inner 18 year old who didn't get any. I'll say that again.

Speaker 1: 13:42

I had an inner 18 year old who didn't get into any of the quote unquote good colleges because my grades were just a little bit short And I was so scared that my parents would be embarrassed to tell their friends that I was going to UC Santa Cruz out of out of high school, which at the time was known as kind of like the hippie college and the college where people just go to get high. And I was just really, really worried and concerned that my parents wouldn't be proud of that decision that I had made because my choices were limited. I also had an inner 30 year old come out who came out to my parents and said that I was queer when I was about 30. And I had a dad who had a very finely tuned silent treatment as I was growing up, so any amount of disappointment would just translate to him kind of ignoring my existence for days and weeks at a time, and I was terrified that, sharing with my parents that I was queer, i was scared that this was going to be a silent treatment that was going to last the rest of my life. I also had an inner 34 year old who, back when I quit my acupuncture clinic job and I felt deeply in my bones that I was never going to go back into clinic work again, i was worried about my parents' feelings at that time. I was less concerned about how I was going to process it. I was more concerned about how my parents were going to process this.

Speaker 1: 15:22

And looking back on all those different parts within me and I can name 10 more, i'm sure if I sat down to think about it unconditional love is something that I've had to gift myself. First, i had to risk losing my parents to fully claim the entire of me. Saying that again, i had to risk losing my parents to fully claim the entirety of me for myself. I had to decide that I deserved more than fragmented love, and I'm really, really lucky in that later in life my parents did a lot of personal work on themselves to be able to show up and accept all the parts of me. But even if they hadn't, it was still important for me to do the work of unconditional love for myself.

Speaker 1: 16:21

The path to unconditional love began with self-validation of my feelings, to truly allow my feelings to exist and not treat them like problems to fix or to override. And my body, with my partner, all along this way, gave me breadcrumbs. It sent me signals about what I need and what I crave. It sent me signs when I was off track. My body was the first one to tell me to tune in and not tune out. And I've often said that I would be doing this work, this work that we do in empowered curiosity, even if I won the lottery. I get turned on and so excited when I get to support and witness people as they find their way into living their purpose And to being able to really express what their doubt is. And even if I didn't make a single dollar. This is the legacy that I want to leave.

Speaker 1: 17:13

So my business said okay, put your money where your mouth is, girl. So for several months I ran my business on a wire thin margin. I was able to pay my contractors, i kept the lights on, but I didn't draw personal salary, and the interesting thing is that we have been planning for this, my business and I. I had set aside enough money for my business to run itself for three months if I needed to, but I had so much resistance to tapping into those reserves. I had so much fear come up around utilizing the money that I had earmarked for exactly this reason, which brings me to that second question that my business was asking, which is do you trust me? Using that money felt dysregulating, but it also felt like a line of communication to my business that said I trust you, i trust us, i trust that this is a moment, i trust that it will rain again, i trust that this reservoir will be full again.

Speaker 1: 18:14

And trusting my business doesn't mean that I take a passive role I want to be really, really clear about this but it does mean that I take a less controlling role. It means that I stop trying to fit it into a mold that it doesn't want to be crammed into. It means that I stop holding its value up against external metrics like likes and views and number of seats filled when it comes to measuring success. And and really I said that weird. It means that I stop holding its value up against external metrics like likes and views or number of seats filled. When it comes to measuring success and feeling good about what it is that I do, it's more of an internal feeling, not an external validation. It means that I am guided by what has always felt aligned for me, which is the quality of the relationships that I cultivate with my clients and my community, and that matters so much more than the quantity. And if I can trust this, then the reins will come. Trusting that the reins will come leads me to the next question that my business was asking me, which is do you want to be in a long-term, committed relationship with me?

Speaker 1: 19:30

And oh man, this is a tricky one, because having a foot wedged in the exit door so that it can't close completely has always represented safety for me. I've always had a plan B, a plan C, a plan D, a plan E all the way down the line, and what I've learned through this contraction is that embodiment of business being relational. I got to actually practice that. I mean, like who doesn't love being in a relationship when things are going really really good right? Like I fucking love my business When everything is flowing, everything is feeling really aligned. There's plenty of money in the bank. My clients are all so affirming and, for the first time since I opened up my coaching practice in 2020, things were feeling really shaky. Things were starting to feel kind of scary and what I realized is okay. So here's an opportunity to actually practice this concept of business being relational. And if my business were a person that I loved? what they're saying is we've been dating for three years and I'm scared. You've got a toe out the door. I see that foot that is out the door that is propping that exit door open, and I don't know if you'd love me if the money dried up. I don't know if you would trust me and I don't know if you want to be in this relationship for the long haul.

Speaker 1: 21:00

So, relationally, a rupture has happened, and one of the core pillars of how I approach relationships is that when there's a rupture, it's an opportunity for repair. Repair puts us back on the same team. Repair creates a stronger bond, and what my business and I needed to learn is that commitment doesn't mean this is what our life is always going to look like. This is what our business is always going to look like, but trust means that we will shift and navigate the tides as they come. Algorithms be damned And unconditional. Love means that we will create rain catchment system so that we can take the pressure off of performance during the dry seasons. Love, commitment and trust are all exercised with flexibility.

Speaker 1: 21:53

So my business was asking me to say like, can we, the two of us, be in this for the long haul and hold to each other in a way that doesn't feel restrictive, in a way that doesn't feel like either of our spirits are getting shut down and in a way that we get to be the best versions of ourselves? So why am I sharing all of this with you? Because, after all, i am a business coach, right, and I teach other people how to make money and, oh my gosh, i had months within last year where I couldn't pay myself. I'm sharing all this because I want to normalize that. Running a business is hard. People share these curated versions of how they want their lives to look like from the outside And we never know what's happening on the inside, and that's not the kind of relationship that I want to have with you.

Speaker 1: 22:41

I am transparent with this parent, with this community, about what's happening in my business, because I don't want to be pedestalized And I'm very happy to say that we are back on track to where we need to be Empowered. Curiosity supports myself full time, supports my producer, andre, full time and my assistant, alicia part time, and giving my business and myself a chance to breathe and reconnect slowly is exactly what we needed. Slow does not mean ineffective. I also want to expand your perspective on this concept that money and results and outcomes are everything. All in all, i was short about 12k in terms of what I needed to pay myself. I look at that money now, i look at the 12k now and I think I just spent 12k to integrate some big lessons around trust, unconditional love and commitment, and to me, that is not a bad investment.

Speaker 1: 23:41

I also want to point out that, as a coach, the pressure to integrate as quickly as possible so that we can share the work as offers in the world, that pressure is real. But to me, what I'm feeling into is that feels like the creation of another transactional and conditional bond, this feeling of I need to learn this so that I can create some sort of product so that people will buy from me. It's a pattern for me and it's something that I'm choosing to shift energetically within myself, and it's something that I have a lot of awareness now that I didn't always have before, and part of that is because I honestly get so excited when I learn something that I want to immediately share with the world. But again, rooting back into the commitment that I have with my business means that there is plenty of time to share all the things that I need to share. The scarcity of time that I feel sometimes is something that I created with my own mind and it's not the reality of the current space that I live in. And I found myself I was flipping through my journal the other day as I was writing out this outline, and I found myself writing many permission slips during that time. It's a practice that I go back to over and over again. If you've worked with me in any sort of like group coaching or individual coaching container, i ask you to write permission slips for yourself, and during the thick of it I wrote in my journal.

Speaker 1: 25:10

This contraction in my business is showing up for me to integrate. I give myself permission to take as much time as I need, because it's hard. I give myself permission to decide when and if I share it with my community And in this case I choose to share it because I want you to feel a little less alone in the world of entrepreneurship by visiting my little corner of the internet. But it took me six months to feel integrated and regulated enough about this to share. I certainly did not have the perspective of the contraction being a portal for me to open up to deeper surrender with my business at the time that it was happening.

Speaker 1: 25:50

And surrender, oh my gosh. If you've been in the empowered curiosity world for any amount of time now, you'll know that this is a big word for me. It is my North Star, it's my compass, it's my purpose, it's my dow. I've interviewed a few of my BAM members. You can go back and listen to that episode. It's episode 94.

Speaker 1: 26:14

And we discuss what the dow means, if that's an unfamiliar term for you. But I also feel like I might have to do a solo episode about what the dow is. I lead all my clients on something that I call a dow meditation. It helps you land on a singular word. That is your compass. And I've been able to over the years, first using myself as this big experimenter on the dow, but also now seeing clients really interact with this, dow on these really really beautiful layers and how that has rippled out into not just their businesses. It's rippled out into their personal lives, into their relationships, because it's this deep medicine and I honestly sometimes have trouble explaining how much this word surrender means to me.

Speaker 1: 27:19

So surrender is not from the perspective of like, oh, fuck it, i give up. What it's saying in relational terms. It's saying to the other entity, whether it's a client, a friend, a partner, a creature or, yes, even my business. It's saying I trust you, i love you and I'm committing to being in this in the long haul for you. Nope, saying that differently I trust you, i love you and I commit to being in this for the long haul with you.

Speaker 1: 27:52

My business is not a compartmentalized fragment of me. It's an integrated part of who I am, how I express, how I live in alignment with purpose. And it's often asked me to surrender, to stop trying to control everything and everyone that touches my business. And it feels like a lot of these instances of surrender helped prepare me for this big expression of surrender, of a contraction, of an income contraction in November, and the effects of this contraction has also been rippling through my own personal life. In many ways, i'm continuing to learn how to surrender. I'm continuing to learn that it is my deepest expression of love, how it encourages the other entity to step forward in this space that I've been taking up out of fear, and how that stepping forward allows us to co-create something magical that I could not have ever imagined on my own.