The Pleasure Revolution: Transforming Business Through Embodied Leadership - EP 034

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The way we do business is evolving. The old systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and hustle culture are crumbling, creating space for a new paradigm—one rooted in sustainability, embodied leadership, and collective awareness. As we enter the Year of the Wood Snake, a time of transformation and wisdom, I'm launching Season 2 of Pleasure & Profits to explore how pleasure isn't just a luxury—it's a revolutionary force for creating successful, sustainable businesses.

Drawing from my decades of experience supporting thought leaders and my own journey of transformation, I share why now is the time for this vital shift in how we approach business and leadership. When we integrate pleasure with impact and profit, we create businesses that not only feel good but thrive long-term.

Episode Takeaways:

• The systems of capitalism and patriarchy are no longer sustainable, and there's an urgency to create something better
• People are waking up to the need for change, and collective awareness is growing stronger
• Hustle culture is breaking down, proving that constant busyness is not the path to success or fulfillment
• Prioritizing pleasure is a radical but essential part of building a sustainable, fulfilling business
• Impact, profit, and pleasure work together synergistically to create meaningful and lasting success
• Letting go of outdated conditioning is a necessary part of personal and professional transformation

Key Insights:

"Maybe you're not playing the game wrong. Maybe you're playing the wrong game."

"Your business should be a source of joy, not just external success. When you prioritize pleasure in your daily operations, in your team dynamics, in your personal schedule, you tap into a creative energy that naturally enhances both your impact and your profitability."

Resources I Mention:

• The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte
• Qoya Inspired Movement by Rochelle Schieck
• Episode 28: "With Love and Optimism for our Future"
• Episode 15 with Lisa Nichols

Connect With Me:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @RachelAnzalone
• Facebook: Rachel.Anzalone
• LinkedIn: RachelAnzalone

Question for Your Reflection:

Where in your current experience is there an opportunity for you to more carefully examine the water that you are swimming in? Where are you so conditioned and habituated to your environment that maybe you're missing something that's right in front of your face?

Did this episode resonate with you? Share it with another visionary leader who needs to hear this message, and don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Your support helps other impact-driven entrepreneurs find their way to our community.

Remember: Your pleasure is your power. 💫

Ready to step into the pleasure revolution and transform how you do business? Let's explore how to maximize impact, profit, and pleasure in alignment with the new paradigm. Schedule a time to connect with me right here >>>

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host, Rachel Anzalone, and this is the very first episode of our second season. Coming to you on this Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Wood Snake in the Chinese Zodiac. Which aligns beautifully with the theme of our podcast. The snake represents yin, feminine energy. It symbolizes wisdom, intuition, transformation, elegance, and subtle power.

And it's also the new moon in Aquarius, an initiation into our own abilities as visionaries to see the truth behind the facade and to go forward with confidence. Welcome. I'm really excited to share this new season with you. We'll get into what inspired the themes of this season and I'll share a little bit about where we're headed in just a minute.

But first, I want to share a little BTS with you. So if you've listened to season one, I talked about some of this along the way, and I think it's really helpful to share some hindsight perspective as well.

So in the very first episode of this podcast back in November 2023, I shared that I've always been the behind the scenes person. Specifically for over a decade, I've been working behind the scenes, supporting other thought leaders, speakers, authors, coaches, and experts to share their work in the world. And that this podcast was really my first foray into creating my own platform, my own space to share publicly the things that I've been saying behind the scenes for a long, long time.

And along the way, I shared some nuggets about what I was testing and trying and experimenting with, with the podcast specifically, because the first season of this podcast really was just that, it was an experiment. One that was fun and challenging and labor intensive and anxiety inducing at times and totally worth it because I learned so much doing this last year. The hardest thing for me was just being a beginner and letting it be that, the podcast of a beginner. And of course I tell my clients this all the time, nothing is golden the first time that you do it. And so, I had to let myself be the beginner again and to truly let it be a practice and that practice continues.

One of the things that was experimental last season was figuring out exactly what I wanted to share with you. And the way I approached that often was week by week, whatever I was inspired to share in the moment. And that included having some really great conversations with really interesting people in our guest interviews. And that was all working just fine. And then something shifted for me.

A few months ago in early November, I had an experience that gave me a level of clarity that really is the inspiration for what we're focusing on this season. If you want to hear more about that, check out episode 28 called With Love and Optimism for our Future. For now, I'll just say this. I became aware in the core of my being that there is an urgency to the work that we're here to do. To the work that I'm here to do and to the work that you're here to do, I believe, because you're here, because you're listening to this.

There is a very real urgency because there are very real consequences to the continued occupation of our minds, our bodies, our communities, and our planet by the version of capitalism that we've been operating in and by colonialism and by the patriarchy. These are the waters that we have been swimming in our entire lives and for many generations before us. And just like fish, we're generally not even aware of the water we're in.

But as we're evolving, as as our capacity to see and hear and feel and sense the resonance of the world around us or the lack thereof, we've been becoming more and more aware that there's something not quite right in these waters or more accurately, that these waters are toxic and destructive and that something has to change.

Collectively we've been operating under the belief that if we play by the rules of these systems that we will be able to get ahead and to change things and make the world around us better, more resonant, more desirable, more aligned. I've been playing that game for a long time trying to make incremental change from within the system and I'll share more about that in a minute.

But over the last couple of years, I've been having this slow realization that this work is not about making incremental changes to existing systems, but about creating a whole new way of operating. But about creating a whole new way of operating in the world, a whole new way of doing business.

In episode 15, my friend and former client, Lisa Nichols, reminded me of something that I said to her many years ago. And this sentiment has been on my mind so much as I've been developing this season of the podcast. What I said to her, and what I think may be true for so many of us is this. Maybe you're not playing the game wrong. Maybe you're playing the wrong game. I think we have been playing the wrong game. We've been playing their game and in doing so we've allowed ourselves to be managed and manipulated and manhandled into believing that we have to adapt to their way of operating in order to make progress. And often we find ourselves just treading water, consumed by the distractions of perfectionism, of approval seeking, of vanity metrics, of waiting to be invited or given permission of things that just don't matter instead of finding real solutions.

But, this collective awakening has been building momentum and as more and more women and men are waking up to this and opting out of the oppressor's game, these systems are beginning to collapse around us. Hustle culture is dying and systems of exploitation are collapsing because they simply are not sustainable.

I believe that I believe what we're experiencing in the current chaotic state of affairs is the death rattle of a dysfunctional culture created by individuals that are desperately trying to hang on to what they've claimed through violence and vitriol. And so you might be wondering, as these systems collapse, what comes next? That is what's at the heart of what we're digging into this season. The emergence of a new paradigm, a new way of operating in the world, and specifically in business, that is built around sustainability, embodiment, feminine leadership, and collective well-being.

And I believe that pleasure is the power that will birth that new paradigm. Hustle culture is built on fear and lack and not enoughness. It requires that we're constantly looking outside of ourselves for what we need to fill the void and that we're willing to pay any price to do so. The experience of pleasure requires the ability to be present, to recognize our wholeness, to feel resonance, oneness.

And it's through the cultivation of those skills that we're able to tap into our own capacity to create meaningful change and entirely new ways. Hustle culture says you have to suffer and sacrifice for success. In the pleasure paradigm, success is inevitable and it's available to us in every moment because success is not about checking off to-do lists or achieving external accomplishments. Success is satisfaction. It's a state of being.

And that state of being is what creates change.

So how did I get here? After two decades of existing in the cycle of burning the candle at both ends, followed by burnout and then recovery, and then repeat. It was 2014 when I first started doing this freelance supporting role for other entrepreneurs, as I said, thought leaders, speakers, coaches, in the personal development and online business worlds. And I was on my own journey at the time.

I had worked in these corporate environments where, you know, the expectation was that you give and give and give at any cost. And I had left that world and started my holistic wellness practice. And through my holistic wellness practice. And so often the people who are coming to see me were coming from a place where the dynamic was truly disempowering to them. And it was around that time that I started studying The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte. It wasn't long after that I discovered the practice of Qoya Inspired Movement created by Rochelle Schieck.

I found myself on my own journey of coming back to myself, of figuring out what it was that was really important to me, what I wanted to be experiencing, getting back in touch with who I was before I learned how to be a good student, be a good employee, be a good wife, and all of these masks that we wear, these roles that we play, who was I really at my core and what was really important to me. And so I was in that work myself when I started doing this work to support people who truly were leaders in the world of self-empowerment, of personal development. And what I often saw was a real disconnect between what was being taught and what was being practiced. And I couldn't not see that there was incongruity there.

I found myself asking questions and trying to nudge things in a different direction based on what I was learning myself and what I was practicing. And what I found was that some people were open to hearing these ideas and contemplating them and playing with them a little bit. Some people weren't at all. For some people, these were questions, thoughts they'd never had. I had one client say to me when I asked her, what is it that you want? Not what do you think is good for the business, not what do you think you're supposed to do or what you should do, but what do you want? She truly looked at me with a blank stare and said, no one's ever asked me that before.

And so bridging the gap between introducing these ideas and asking these questions and getting people to actually execute these ideas and implement these practices operationally in their business and marketing was like such a massive distance. I wasn't in the place to be able to bring people across that bridge because I was just doing the work myself as well.

And so I watched these cycles with people often these like intense work cycles and whether they were burning themselves out or they were burning their teams out, it was just really apparent to me that this was not a sustainable way of operating for anyone. And so I had to remove myself from those circumstances more than once. And I kept trying to make change like I would come out and then I go back in and at one point I thought, okay, when I take on the new client, I'm going to tell them that this is the way I do things from the front end. And I did that and I brought on new clients and I presented them with this philosophy that this was the way we would do things. Again, and they would be excited and they would be interested and like, and love it and feel like super aligned with it. But when it came down to it, when it came down to actually doing the work or trusting the process, when it came down to taking the risk of doing things in a way that was different than what they saw their peers doing, that again was just a bridge too far.

And so I began to realize that I was trying, and so I would try to softly nudge and be patient and move people through and allow for them to sort of be in their process, to start to understand and incorporate and be super patient with this process. And what I found at some point, I finally realized that I was trying to help them to make this change, but that I was still swimming in the water myself.

I was like trying to save someone from drowning while I was sinking in quicksand. So I really had to get myself on firmer ground to get the clarity that I shared with you a few moments ago. And so that's the work that I have been doing over these last few years has been really focusing on getting myself aligned, growing my own capacity, and learning how to really walk my own talk and lean into this and trust this wisdom that I've known and then have begun to practice and have begun to embody and has become my way of operating in the world.

And so what's beautiful about having taken the time to do that is that while I was doing it, the momentum of this revolution was also building. Where 10 years ago, when I first started talking about some of these things in relation to business, I felt like I was a lonely, tiny little voice whispering in the void. Just whispering. And now I can hear that there's this chorus of voices all around me focused on this same mission.

Someone said, nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. And the time for this idea, this revolution is now. It is in the zeitgeist. It is in the collective. There are hundreds or thousands of voices all sharing this message that it is time to change the way we're doing things, that it is time for this shift in the paradigm.

In fact, there is so much momentum happening in that direction that the people who benefit from it being otherwise are desperately trying to hang on to the way things have always been done.

One of the things that's interesting right now is that when we look around at examples of entrepreneurs who built incredibly successful businesses over the last 10 or 15 or 20 years, who are now becoming aware of the harm that their way of operating caused to themselves, to their well-being, to their relationships, and often to their team and to their community, the people that they were intending to serve. Many of them are now sharing a greater wisdom that they gained along the way through that process, the wisdom that what they were doing and how they were doing it was not sustainable and maybe not doable at all for a significant percentage of their audience.

And so like so many things, it's important that we don't take anything at face value, that we learn to discern for ourselves what's behind the shiny exterior and that we get selective about what's aligned for us to emulate and to implement and to not fall into the trap of believing that because someone else is doing it, that we should be doing it too.

As an impact driven entrepreneur, someone who desires to make a change for the greater good, doing your work in a way that's sustainable is critical. Because if you burn out because you can't sustain the work energetically, or if you quit because you can't sustain the work financially, the consequence is that the impact is lost. 

And that is a loss not just for you, but for all of us.  What's really inspiring to me right now is that there are more and more examples of people who have escaped the hustle trap and are building their businesses in ways that are committed to these principles, sustainability, embodiment, feminine leadership, and collective wellbeing. People who are demonstrating that aligned energy is way more powerful than forcing anything. These are the people who are at the forefront of this pleasure revolution. 

And in addition to diving into specific insights and applications of these principles with me this season, we're also going to have some fantastic guests who are examples of this work in action and who have their own wisdom to share with us.

So what exactly do I mean when I'm talking about pleasure in the context of business? What I mean is that your business should be a source of joy, not just external success. When you prioritize pleasure in your daily operations, in your team dynamics, in your personal schedule, you tap into a creative energy that naturally enhances both your impact and your profitability.

This isn't about indulgence, it's about sustainability and vitality and inspiration and motivation. When you make pleasure a guiding principle in your business, when you focus on taking aligned action that feels good, that feels right, that feels satisfying, that's when something alchemical happens. And I'm tempted to say magical because it might feel that way in the moment, but in reality, it's not magic, it's physics. And it's neuroscience. When you release the resistance of trying to hustle and force things, you come into resonance with what you're wanting to create and when you calm your nervous system to become less reactive, you open yourself up to see what's already there, what's already available to you. And that's when things feel like they, and that's when things start to fall into place in a way that feels magical.

And pleasure is just one of three essential elements that must be cultivated to build a soul-aligned and sustainable business. I'm talking about it here most, I'm talking about it most here because it's the one that's most often neglected. The other two are impact and profit. Your business is a force for transformation, for creating ripples of positive change that extend far beyond your immediate reach.

True impact isn't about just what you do, it's about building systems and approaches that amplify your mission. And when your impact grows, it naturally creates opportunities for greater profit and deeper pleasure in your work.

And what about profitability? Well, a profitable business isn't just about numbers. It's about creating sustainable abundance that fuels your mission and supports your wellbeing. Strong profits enable you to increase your impact through reinvestment and innovation, while simultaneously giving you the freedom to experience more pleasure in your work and life. These three elements, impact, profit and pleasure, are synergistic.

They create a self-reinforcing cycle that enables both world-changing work and personal sovereignty. This alignment allows for your business to become a vehicle for your highest purpose while simultaneously generating abundant resources and life satisfaction. And I believe that this alignment is what's required for us to birth the new paradigm that we desire.

And the most beautiful thing about all of this is that it's not about learning something new. It's about unlearning and unconditioning. It's about coming back to ourselves and tapping into a deep well of wisdom that we already have access to. We've just been trained out of utilizing it because frankly, this wisdom that we have access to is so fucking powerful that when it's unleashed, there is no way for these outdated systems of control and exploitation to survive.

Another beautiful thing about this wisdom we carry is that when unleashed, it benefits everyone because the embodied feminine is inclusive and nurturing and present and committed to the collective well-being.

And so this is where we're headed this season. In some episodes, we'll be dancing with the big ideas behind satisfaction strategy, like the future of feminine leadership, creating soul-aligned impact and understanding wealth as energy and power. And we'll also be getting tactical with topics like a feminine approach to cashflow, building powerful network and alliances, and embodied strategic planning. And we'll be aligning ourselves with the seasons as we go, beginning with building foundations and visioning during this winter season of rest and planning.

I really hope that you're as excited about this season as I am. I invite you to join in on this conversation by sharing your insights and perspectives on these topics with your community and with me by emailing me at [email protected] or by connecting with me and messaging me on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. 

As we wrap up this first episode of the season, I'd like to leave you with this thought for your consideration. Where in your current experience is there an opportunity for you to more carefully examine the water that you are swimming in? In other words, where are you so conditioned and habituated to your environment that maybe you're missing something that's right in front of your face? As with everything I share, this is an invitation for your consideration. You get to choose what to do with it.

I'm so honored that you're here with me joining the collective awakening of embodied feminine leadership so that together we can create lasting change in the world.

So happy Lunar New Year and until next time, remember, your pleasure is your power. Take care.