I just sat at the mic today to riff… as I used to, but have not in a while because I got caught up in the “should’s”
I was sixteen, seventeen, driving an ‘85 Toyota Tercel with a CB radio my dad got me hooked up to, working as a courier in the summer. The dispatcher would call an address over the radio, I’d holler my number back, and then I’d flip through this giant paper map book trying to find the street before anyone got impatient! That was the job. That was the whole job.
I’m telling you this because I didn’t know my soul was always meant to be an entrepreneur. I just knew I hated bosses, and I hated anything that felt like Groundhog Day. So I worked restaurants, bars, pharma sales, courier routes — sixteen years of building an income as myself, for myself, before I ever called it a brand or a business.
I want you to sit with that math for a second. Because right now, somewhere in your feed, there’s a woman talking about the launch that made her five million dollars in thirty days. And I need you to know — you don’t know the story of what it took her to get there. You’re looking at her middle and measuring it against your beginning, and that math will never, ever add up in your favor.
You cannot compare your beginning to somebody else’s middle!! I have done it time and time again. It used to piss me off… now I see it as proof, AND I have to allow my own timeline to be what it is! I know I have created a life that many would love to have. I honour that, I am grateful for that, and still, I have not scratched the surface of what I am on this earth for. Neither have YOU.
The closet
When I started my podcast in 2018, I hired someone to help me get the audio right. I literally emptied out my closet and hid in there to record, because I needed the sound quality to be spectacular!
Here’s what actually happened: I’d get the download — the real thing to say, the honest truth that wanted to come through me — and then I’d have to go set everything up. Get in the closet. Check the mic. Make sure the lighting was right for video. Make sure it had three points and a hook and a call to action. By the time all of that was in place, the moment was gone.
My purpose on this earth is to shake people up and wake them up by speaking honest truths. If I have to build a whole production around that before I’m allowed to say it, it isn’t happening. I fell into the trap of thinking things had to look a certain way to be heard, and every time I did something because that’s how someone else did it, I cut off a piece of my soul.
My power is in riffing! Not in the edit. Not in the perfect setup. In the moment I’m tuned in and I just let it come through.
The dog whistle
The same person who helped me with that first podcast once gave me an actual dog whistle. The message behind it: only dogs can hear that sound. Not every ear is built for it.
Only certain you’s are meant to hear me!!
I am not here for every single person to like what I say or fully get what I’m putting down. And when I really understood that — that I wasn’t failing if I wasn’t for everyone — that’s when I stopped trying to sound like the woman in the beige office with the gauze wrapped around her, quoting all the laws of the universe. That’s when I stopped performing “coach” and started just being the person who talks to you like you’re already the smartest, most capable woman in the room, because you are.
If what I say vibrates in you, you’ll know. And if it doesn’t, that’s not a verdict on either of us. That’s just the whistle doing what it’s built to do.
Zero, again
Here’s the part I almost didn’t say out loud: I am fifty-six years old, and I am in a start-up position again! I am at zero.
And I know — I know — that the best any of us ever are is right at the beginning, before we know enough to talk ourselves out of it. I’ve built businesses from a Facebook group before. I’ve gone to zero dollars and past zero into a negative bank account before. And every single time, the thing that gets me through is not a strategy or a system. It’s following the feeling.
Following the feeling is the strategy!!
Not the how, not the growth chart, not the twelve-step funnel. The impulse. The download. The thing that’s already inside you, that doesn’t need you to find where you wrote it down before, because your power is in the riffing, not the archive.
What’s actually on my arm
I have fine-line tattoos I call my little Post-it notes, so I don’t forget. One of them is a message from my mom’s journal, found after she died: I am great! — with her exclamation point, in her handwriting. Another is a sun rising out of water, because there’s a particular beauty at the water’s edge in the early morning light. It’s the beauty of the becoming!
The joy was never in the followers or the dollars. It was always in following me!
So — of everything here, what do you want more of?!
Each tangent I went on has its own episode and article for sure! So what do you want me to go deeper on!
Hit reply or drop it in the comments!! Tell me which one, and that’s the essay I’m writing next.
As I always say and sometimes forget….
Today is a magical day. You have the power to make it so. ✨
I also got the greatest download of what challenge I am going to run for August and I can’t wait to get it out to you!!!
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