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Beginning –
Business owners, especially online, are really pressured to find a singular niche and stick with it. This can be a lot of pressure because our businesses are an extension of who we are and people aren’t easily boxable. For your business to be successful you have to be happy to work on it every single day for hours at a time and it’s hard trying to find a single thing you’re happy to do that much, that often.It’s a delicate dance because in order to effectively market your business, you have to have clarity. If you aren’t sure what you’re doing or offering, neither is your audience and potential clientele / costumers.

Eastern values versus Western values. Eastern values harmony and balance and not so much authenticity or individuality the way Western culture does. Eastern culture is more focused on the whole rather than the individual so everyone’s a lot more keen to pitch in and fill in the spaces of where they’re needed. In the western world, we’re so focused on the individual that we’ve lost sight of the whole and as a result we all suffer for it.The most important thing is to be harmony with yourself. If you are in harmony with yourself, you can spread that peace, ease and joy with others but if you are in disharmony, you spread that energy to others as well. Thus, a good middle balance of focus on the self and the whole is probably best.

7:00 –Work life balance means figuring out how you best function so that you can actively honor that natural energy flow and give your business what it needs to thrive. Entrepreneurs are notorious for working themselves into the ground but since your business is a representation of yourself, if you’re burning yourself out, that’s the energy will show through.

It’s okay to break away from the schedule that the mainstream culture would have you believe you’re “supposed” to be on. If you work best at night after dedicating your morning and day to yourself and your family, it’s okay to honor that.Finding clarity means taking a look at your values and formulating your business around those. Most often we think our goals are centered around material things (money, houses, cars, etc) but when we take the time to look deeper we find that they’re more abstract. What we really want is to be able to care for and spend time with our loved ones and too many of us put that on the backburner while we work on our business.

This becomes a terrible cycle of “waiting until” certain goals are met before you allow yourself the leisure of spending with loved ones when really we can do that first. We don’t have to meet the goals in order to care for, love and spend time with them and when we are meeting those true priorities first, we have more love and energy to put into the work. It’s counter intuitive but it is the best way to structure things.When we get hyper focused on the wrong goals, we make poor decisions in an effort to meet those goals. This can cause deterioration in our health, relationships or even put ourselves in danger.

15:55 –Psychosomatic illnesses are most often caused by stress. To learn how to manage her own stress, our guest put more stress on herself by going back to school to get a second master’s degree in counseling which of course didn’t help her problems. The patterns that were causing her stress were still at play.Knowing and implementing are two very different things. If you put into practice that which you’re learning, you unlock all sorts of new knowledge on the subject that you can’t get from a book or any other learning material.

Most often, our beliefs and our self worth are what is causing our stress. The beliefs that have been put on us by others about what we should or shouldn’t be doing and how those things effect our worthiness. We work ourselves to death to meet achievements in order to feel as though we’re “good enough”.We have to find other, easier ways to feel like we’re enough and stop quantifying it based on our productivity and achievements. We have to individually define what is enough for us, outside and independent of how others feel about it.

The beliefs of having to achieve certain goals in order to be enough is something that’s passed down to us from our caregivers who also had that belief passed onto them from their own. This perpetuation becomes part of our culture where most everyone around us believes it to be true. So then we’re all stuck with these same wounds and if we decide to break out of those perpetuated patterns other’s make it harder by questioning our decisions and attempting to reign us back in.

26:20 –All the money and “success” in the world isn’t worth anything if it costs you your health, your relationships or you have no available time to enjoy it.Women are generally seen as the nurturers and fall into the demanding role of caregiver often at the cost of their own needs in order to meet this role. We have to remember that the caregiver is just as important the one(s) being cared for and making sure that they also are cared for.Choosing to change your patterns is hard. Staying in your patterns is hard. Everything is hard. Choose your hard. Life is a constant trade off of hard.

The patterns of discord are always the same. You do eventually find the end of the list of things people are upset with you about when you begin choosing yourself. It may seem like new conflict but it’s the same conflict with a new mask on is all. This is great because you’re not constantly having to figure out how to navigate a new problem. It’s generally the same underlying problem over and over again, framed differently.

32:25 –Sometimes you have setbacks. You’ll be doing really well holding your boundaries and priorities and then something will happen that sets you back for a bit. It’s important to hold compassion for yourself in these moments because setbacks are normal. Maintain awareness of the pattern and do your best to get yourself back on track.We don’t understand what the problem is until we dissect and analyze it. That’s what the inner work is that people are always talking about. Being aware of your own patterns helps you to navigate them when they pop back up because they will always pop back up. They will, though, become easier and quicker to navigate and manage as you practice.

People will really confuse you about yourself and your needs and decisions. We’re wired for external validation and when people begin putting their thoughts and opinions on you, and they will, it makes you question yourself. We have to learn how to flip the external validation needs into internal validation.Journaling and other forms of note taking helps you to map out what you’re doing and thinking so that when you do get confused you can come back and look at the organized thoughts about it and make sense of it.
External validation sets us back from the progress we could be making. You’re better off not even sharing your thoughts and plans with others because so many of them will try and talk you out of it based on their own programming and beliefs. Validate yourself in your goals.The spiral of progress uncovers layers. So even though it may be the same issue popping up yet again, it’s going to help you dig it deeper out of your subconscious so it can impact you less and less as time goes on. You’re still moving forward.It’s unrealistic to expect the journey to be linear.
44:05 –Until the internet, the only information and knowledge we were privy to was that which existed in the minds and books of those in our hometown. Books aren’t always accurate and people’s knowledge is often confused and bias. We’re finding new language to make these things more easily understood and the internet has made them more accessible.What works for you now may not work for you later so it’s important to allow the flexibility and malleability of life to transform if it needs to. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that changing things up a little means you’re being inconsistent. The very nature of life is constant change. Without the allowance of adaptability and pivoting, we become stagnant in our progress making.Many of us want to beat ourselves up for what we see as inconsistency because we didn’t meet our goals for the day when our only crime is being only one person. We can set intentions and hopes for the day but we can’t always ensure that the day unfolds to allow for those things. Sometimes our attention and energy is needed elsewhere and that’s okay. We simply pick back up the next day.We have to reparent ourself through things. Think of yourself as a child and then give yourself the advice, comfort and nurturing love that a good parent would. Especially when you’re having big emotions or beating yourself up about being human. AssuranceBy William Stafford


Ellen Patricia, MA(Counseling), PCC

• https://www.instagram.com/ellenpatricia.world