Dancing In The Liminal Space Of This Moment - EP 007

In this episode we’re talking about this particular time period we’re in—this mid-holidays, almost-end-of-year, not-quite-the-new-year, limbo that is mid-December, what it means for us as entrepreneurs, what most people are doing in this season & how there's an more empowered way. 

Instead of being all in—hustling till the bitter end—or all out—full shut down mode, there’s a third more powerful, more empowered way to approach this season. One that’s aligned with what nature—including our intuition—is guiding us towards, if we’re available to listen. 

I invite you to take your time to dance in this liminal space. To trust yourself. To trust the timing. To remember that you are on your own schedule.

Takeaways

• A more empowered approach to this season is to slow down, reflect, and daydream about the future.
• Embodying gratitude and setting goals aligned with your vision and values is important.
• As an entrepreneur, consider the well-being of your team and trust the timing of your plans.
  

Episode Chapters

00:00 - Navigating the Challenges of the Mid-December Holiday Season

02:27 - Choosing an Empowered Approach: Slowing Down and Reflecting

08:07 - Embodying Gratitude and Setting Aligned Goals

20:21 - Trusting the Timing of Your Plans

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Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. Today I wanna talk about this particular time period we're in, this mid-holidays, almost end of the year, not quite the new year, limbo, that is mid-December. It's a loaded time. If you have family, children, if you're celebrating the holidays, the expectations, even if or especially if they're self-imposed can be massive and overwhelming. Family interactions can be really challenging and generally the level of unhingedness around us everywhere can get a little out of control this time of year. It's also a loaded time if you don't have family and or if you're not celebrating the holidays because you're just inundated with all of the hoopla, and again, there might be expectations, internal or external, that you should be doing things a certain way that maybe are impossible or at the very least undesirable or misaligned for you. 

I personally land somewhere in the middle of all this. I don't have small children at home, but I do have a niece and a nephew I'll be visiting. And I have adult stepchildren who I'll be spending time with, one of whom is a lover of Christmas and I think is quite upset that we're not getting a tree, along with my in-laws where we will consume the feast of all feasts on Christmas Day. I'm not into decorating. I loathe Christmas music. But I love the cookies my mom bakes and chips to me in Texas from her home in New York every year. Grandma Beech's cut out cookies in the shape of trees and stars and Cucciadatti, Italian fig cookies that are to die for. I'm happy to buy gifts for those people close to me, but I find the shopping process pretty unbearable this time of year. Actually, fine shopping, kind of unbearable all the time, but being self-employed, most of the time I have the freedom to do things like go shopping when very few people are out and about. But this time of year, there is no such time. It's long lines, traffic, crowds, and general frenzy everywhere you go. 

For us entrepreneurs, this time of year is also loaded with additional pressures. Did we meet our goals for the year? How are we lined up for next year? How do we add all the holiday obligations on top of already full plates? If you're anywhere on the interwebs, there seems to be a binary pull into two camps for how to handle this end of year madness. On one side, there's camp can't stop, won't stop - the hustlers, the champions for finishing strong. They can be heard saying things like, “There are still three weeks left in the year. You can still hit your goals. And if you've already hit them, then it's not too late to create new goals. Don't stop now. Keep the momentum going into the new year.” 

If my inbox is any indication, then this camp is going strong. I'm not subscribed to many email lists because generally it's just all a little too much for me. With the few I am subscribed to, I've gotten more sales emails in the last few weeks than in the entire previous six months. If you're on social media at all, you'll see some of these folks would seem to have you believe that if you slow down now, that you will turn into a blob of nothing and have to reform yourself into a human being in a few weeks just to get started again. Or that you have to commit now if you want to start the New Year strong and that if you wait until after the holidays, all will be lost. Momentum, opportunities, access to their one-of-a-kind life-changing program. It's all very intense. 

At the other end of the spectrum is Camp Fuck It. These folks have already thrown in the towel and are happy to coast through the end of the year and begin fresh on January 1st, or January 2nd, or more likely January 15th, because it takes a minute to get back into the groove after the holidays. Since you're listening to this podcast, I'm guessing you're not in the Fuck It camp. Or if you are, it's not by choice, but because you’re in dorsal vagal freeze response is a result of all of the insanity. If that's you, then I want you to know that I feel you. I've been there, many of us have been. And my advice to you is this, by all means, rest. Rest up good. Sometimes rest is the most productive thing you can do. And then when you're ready for re-entry, make it a priority to rebuild your business and life so that you don't end up in that place again. That's what I'm here for. 

If, however, you're finding yourself in the liminal space between the desire to rest and the nagging feeling that you should push on, do more, finish strong, then here's what you need to know. This push-pull your feeling is a debate between what you perceive is required of you by the outside world and what your deep inner knowing is telling you. You know it's time to slow down, but there is some voice of obligation telling you that you can't do that. 

If you're attached to the binary, that you're either all in or all out, the danger, I think, in this liminal space is in not choosing a side and instead keeping one foot in each camp feeling like you need to rest but you can't and yet not really committing to accomplishing anything mean and fault either. Instead you find yourself languishing in the in-between, feeling both exhausted and guilty, two feelings that are big red flags that you're out of alignment.

Instead of being all in, in camp, can't stop, won't stop, or all out, in camp fuck it, there's a third, more powerful, more empowered way to approach this season. One that's aligned with what nature, including our intuition, is guiding us towards, if we're available to listen to it. I'm not a big fan of New Year, New You vibes. I generally find the calendar itself is pretty arbitrary. And if you know anything about the Gregorian calendar, then you know it is, in fact, pretty freaking arbitrary. And yet we get so attached to these dates as if they have some significance besides the meanings we lay on top of them. There've been plenty of new years that didn't feel new or fresh at all to me. I often find a different, more resonant date in the year. Sometimes it's the Chinese New Year, sometimes it's my birthday in July.

Generally, it's something more aligned with the moon cycles, which feel 1,000% more meaningful to me. What I do fully embrace is the season change and connecting with the rhythm of the Earth, the stars, the universe, listening to nature, listening to ourselves. This week we've experienced the new moon in Sagittarius. Mercury is now in retrograde through the end of the year, and we're approaching the winter solstice. So what does all of that mean? I'll talk more about the winter solstice next week, but what's important for now is this. All signs from nature point to slowing down, taking time to reflect, and spending some time daydreaming before making plans. It's time to listen, to receive, to wait for missing pieces of information to appear. It's time to assess and edit and lean into the darkness, a time to learn to trust that all is exactly as it's meant to be, even if we can't see the whole picture yet. This is the season of internal reflection, of thoughtfulness, of tuning into the feminine energies of listening, receiving, and nurturing. 

So rather than finishing strong or not finishing at all, what if you finished carefully and patiently and with intentionality? What if you took time to reflect on the past year? What did you create or accomplish? What investments did you make in yourself or those you love? What challenges did you overcome? What lessons did you learn? What are you proud of? What do you want to carry into the next year? What do you want to edit or leave behind?

What if instead of rushing through this season or checking out altogether, you made some time to ask these questions and really listen for the answers and then to just be with them, to marinate in it all? And then what if you found a way to express gratitude for all of it, including maybe especially the challenges and the lessons learned? Whether that's through journaling, prayer, meditation, letter writing, conversations with people you love, a nature offering, a movement practice, maybe put on a song you love and dance your gratitude, either alone or with other people you love. 

While it's meaningful to think grateful thoughts, the real power is in being grateful. Feeling the sensation of gratitude in your heart and in your body, this sensation shifts your vibration and aligns you even more with your path and your purpose. So you can find a way to embody gratitude. This exercise will become all that much more powerful. 

Remember, gratitude is the ultimate state of receivership. It's a common approach. It's a common approach to look at our benchmarks and KPIs from the previous year and set new ones based on how we've performed in the past. But when we do that, all we can see is what's possible based on our history and our intellect and what we've seen other people do.

We're leaving out a whole lot of opportunity that comes when we open ourselves up to inspiration. So before you shift into that more masculine energy of making all your plans for the new year, take some time to daydream about the future. When we envision who we wanna be and how we wanna be, how we wanna feel and what we want to experience, we allow for so much possibility to arise. 

I was on a call the other day with a group of entrepreneurs that are part of the Archangel community when this question was posed to us. “If you only had three years to live and you knew that during those three years, you'd be super healthy, there's nothing wrong with you, but your life would end in three years, what would you do with the remaining time of yours to create the greatest change for the most amount of people?” It was an interesting reflection for me because one of my gifts is the ability to see what's possible for other people, for my clients, like the biggest, brightest future for them. And with that vision comes a fully downloaded map of how to get there. And then I can guide them step by step down the path, keeping them focused on priorities, choosing the right next step and the right next project, and not getting distracted by all of the shiny objects. 

This is such a gift because what I found is that most of us either can't see what's possible for ourselves, or even if we can see it, we can't quite believe it. Or if we can believe it, we get so overwhelmed by all the steps to get there that we distract ourselves by hyper-focusing on inconsequential things and lose sight of the path altogether. Now I say most of us because I have this challenge too, because I can see all of this for my clients and effectively guide them on their paths, but it's so freaking hard to do for myself. I think this is true for all of us when we're in our zone of genius. It's the emotional attachment to the outcome that gets in our way, and the vulnerability we feel when we're working in our own purpose and passion.

And so, well, I've held a loose idea of what my big vision is for a long, long time. My day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month approach has been to focus my intention solely on the next right step. I ask myself, my guides, my gods, to me they're all the same. What's the next one thing I need to do? I ask myself, my guides, my gods, they're all the same to me. What's the one thing I need to focus on right now? And then I do that one thing. And then the next thing. And then the next. 

And often, I'll know something is the right thing for me, but the timing is not right now. And so patience is required. And when the time comes, things happen easily. They don't need to be forced. So I'm always holding that bigger long-term vision in the background, but not focusing on what's 10 steps down the road, just focusing on what's right here, right now. 

We've all heard the adage that most of us overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. For me, this process of creating the vision, then receiving a map, and these terms, I think, are interchangeable. Creating, receiving, envisioning, to me, it's all the same. Then letting go and focusing on the next right thing has been the key to opening up to allowing opportunities that I could not have imagined from where I started. So when I was reflecting on this question the other day, I realized that it's been a while since I reflected on what that big vision is. For about 18 months, I've been putting one foot in front of the other, taking steps that outwardly and objectively don't maybe seem to make much sense, but asking and listening and trusting the process. And from where I'm sitting now, that bigger vision, which once felt so big, so far away, no longer feels daunting. It feels like, of course, of course that's where I'll be in three years and probably even sooner. It no longer feels like a someday vision. It now feels like an inevitable outcome of the work I've been putting in. 

In my experience, it's the things and the timing that feel like, “of course,” it couldn't be any other way that are the most aligned and truest to our path. And often new, even more brilliant possibilities arise as we make our way down the path and we get to choose from them if we want. We get to change the destination or change the path as we go, as long as we're not head down, lost in the weeds, focusing on the details that, well, maybe not unimportant or probably not the most consequential. And so as you're daydreaming about what's possible and considering this vision, make sure you take into account all the things that are important to you. The impact that you wanna have on the lives of the people around you, your friends, family, team, community, the world at large. The life you want to be living along the way, what lights you up, brings you joy and pleasure, the quality of life you want to be experiencing. And don't get attached to the how, to the mechanisms, especially the mechanisms of your business. Not yet. Remember, you're just daydreaming, and daydreaming has no constraints.

Okay, so then once you've reflected on the past year, embodied gratitude for all that you've experienced and daydreamed about what's to come, now, if you're ready, it's time to set your goals and make your plans. And this is a really powerful exercise that I love to do for myself and with my clients because it allows for so much expansiveness and really opens you up to what it is that you truly desire. Once you've daydreamed it all, write it all down and then figure out what that costs, every single thing. And from there, you have an impact and an income goal for yourself. And that's the starting point for the goals for your business. And then once you have that identified, then you can get into what that means in terms of your revenue goals, your business benchmarks, your KPIs.

But don't forget those first steps. You have to hold them in your heart or post them on the wall in front of you as you do your business planning. It's so easy to get all of that work done and then default to the usual planning mode. Back to our history, back to what we've seen other people do. You have to come back to that vision again and again and trust that even if you don't know exactly how you'll get there from where you're standing now, that once you start down the path, the next steps will appear.

Now, we're going to take a little sidebar here for a moment because there's this thing that happens when you, the visionary entrepreneur, take time, create space, and get inspired. And that is, the spigot turns on and then the floodgates open and you get really fired up and excited about what you want to do next. And you forget that your team also needs time and space and rest and reflection, and you suddenly find yourself firehosing the people who you need to support you in bringing all of this to life during the time when they're supposed to be resting and re-energizing. All I can say is don't do it. Just don't do it. Take your time to collect your ideas and plan time to dive into all of it with your team when they're in the best possible position to receive it, organize it and move it forward. The alternative is a fast path to team burnout, to resentment and to high turnover rates. 

So slow your roll and remember that this is your work to do right now. And then you bring in your team when the time is right. In the meantime, the bigger questions you need to consider are who is the person you need to become to live into that vision? How does that person show up? How does that person spend their time? What do you need to invest in to become that person? And so during this mid-December season, I invite you to take your time to dance in this liminal space, to trust yourself, to trust the timing, to remember that the calendar is arbitrary, you're on your own schedule, and the fastest way to any destination is to just put one foot in front of the other and take the next right step in the direction of your goals. And when those goals are based around the impact that you wanna have in the world and the experience you wanna be living, then you're on the right path to creating a sustainable and satisfying business and life. 

Until next time, I'm wishing you even more pleasure and profits. I will see you soon.