Kristen Kalp's Blog, page 9

Structure That Doesn’t Suck // Part 1

If you’re one of my people, you tend to operate in one of two categories. You’re either a big-huge-enormous fan of structure and use it to plan every last detail of your life, or you absolutely hate structure and run from it like you run from that person with a hacking cough who’s got the plague over there.

Let’s make peace with both of those extremes by going a little bit Harry Potter on you.

This is an episode of That’s What She Said!  Listen in below, or find all the episodes here.

Hermione Granger is a really smart, really Type-A individual who uses tools like TIME TRAVEL to take more classes. Her structure level is over the top. You cannot beat Hermione at planning, at doing homework, at reading lists, or at time-turning.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find Luna Lovegood. She’s a laidback, dreamy individual who notices patterns and creatures others miss, subscribes to beliefs others find bizarre, and whose report cards are never crucial to the plot of any J.K. Rowling story.

Both of these humans save Harry Potter’s life at some point in the series. Which is to say…

Structure and serendipity go hand in hand.

They’re both amazing characters. They both get shit done and save the lives of their friends. You’ve got both of them within you, but you’re probably so busy shit-talking the other that you haven’t yet harnessed both of their strengths.

Let’s make peace with your Luna and Hermione parts, starting right now.

If you’re more of a Luna at heart, you’ve said something like, “I’m great at starting a routine and then letting it go the first day I don’t feel like it.”

Because you’re usually not starting *a* routine. You are RENOVATING YOUR LIFE all at once.

You don’t simply stop consuming GMOs and eat a little more kale! You go on a rampage and throw out everything in your pantry that doesn’t fit your strict guidelines, replace your plastics with glass, buy a juicer, start meal planning, and commit to eating 100% organic foods for the rest of time. (I’ve done this many times, including the time I threw out the microwave to kick off a particularly healthy kick. And then purchased a new microwave a few weeks later.)

This Total Life Overhaul works for a few days. You’re doing it! Everything is changing all at once! …and then you find yourself in a cafe with amazing muffins. Sweet, sweet, not-part-of-your-new-life-plan muffins.

FUCK IT, you decide, and throw all that structure out the window in one fell swoop.

Attempts to implement structure in your life are inevitably abandoned when the 18 changes you’ve taken on simultaneously begin to unravel.

Lest you feel superior because you’re on the Hermione end of the spectrum, let’s dive into big changes in Hermione land.

You’ve got your schedule packed with activities. Meal planning happens from mid-afternoon until 5:47 p.m. on Sundays, as well as on Wednesdays at precisely 1:37 p.m., between lunch yoga and afternoon meetings.

You schedule yourself to within an inch of your life and feel stressed by most any change to your plans.

Being one minute late is a catastrophe. Client cancellations are major issues. You don’t understand why people haven’t responded to your Thanksgiving Brunch RSVP 17 weeks in advance. Christmas shopping is done by November first.

Rigidity keeps you uptight on your best days and downright mean on your worst.

…but are you more of a Luna or a Hermione?

Lunas tend to:

+ make amazing work but rarely spend energy selling it

+ have trouble communicating with their peeps consistently

+ freak out about the number of projects they find interesting (“It’s too many!”)

+ panic if they feel ‘locked in’ to a title, project, or way of being

+ spend a great deal of time daydreaming and imagining

+ find money and finances frustrating but uninteresting

+ consistently undervalue their gifts and time

Hermiones tend to:

+ find it difficult to deviate from structure

+ freak out if an assignment doesn’t have any rules

+ enjoy projects less if there’s no chance of getting a gold star

+ overschedule their days and lives

+ fear letting people down, and therefore accept lots of unwanted responsibility

+ push their own needs, particularly creative ones, to the back burner

+ crave freedom, expansion, and stillness, but have trouble finding time for it

The good news is, you’ve got both impulses built right into you!

If you identify with Luna, we’ll work toward creating structure that doesn’t suck in the coming weeks. Those who identify with Hermione will work on adding silence, stillness, and space to let your not-productive bits out to play.

Regardless of how much Luna and how much Hermione you’ve got going on right now, these questions will frame the Structure That Doesn’t Suck series:

What if we play with your schedule so that you aren’t trying to make too many changes to your life at once? And what if we can play with scheduling some — but not all — of your most important work? Further, what if we mark off free time, play time, and not-caregiving time, so that you actually have a break from all that intensity?

Which is to say: what if you commit to doing one thing at a time?

I know you can multitask with the best of them, Hermiones, and that you can daydream while doing any activity at all, Lunas. But what if you only did one thing at a time, all day long?

Both Lunas and Hermiones struggle with overwhelm because both are living in the modern world.

We have more toothpaste options than our ancestors did career choices.

My email list — MY email list — contains more people than Jesus reached in the whole of his time on earth.

To be overwhelmed is the tip of the iceberg and is understating the truth by a long shot.

We’re drowning in choices, in voices, in distractions.

That’s why doing one thing at a time is important, at both the day-to-day level and the career level. You can’t make a movie and an album and a Broadway show simultaneously unless you’re 40 years into your career like Bruce Springsteen, so please don’t try.

Can you commit to doing one task at a time for the coming week?

That won’t change your whole calendar, but it will begin to beat back the overwhelm that threatens to take you under.

P.S.  Your whole year, planned with one question.

The post Structure That Doesn’t Suck // Part 1 appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Let’s talk Steady and Experimental income.

Before we dive into this episode of the podcast, please click here to find your enough number. That way, you’ll have precise and accurate estimates to work with as we create a strategy for the coming months in your business.

This podcast episode comes as a result of looooots of coaching clients (spots open in January, get on the dibs list!) wanting to abandon projects and services they’ve worked on for years to start something entirely new, then pushing on that new thing to start making income immediately. Like, it launched on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we need to be making $4,000 a month, every month until the end of time.

What if we could actively arrange for you to earn two types of income in your business?

And before you ask, NOPE, they’re not active and passive income. These are much bigger, broader, and more interesting categories than those served up by cis-white-male marketing gurus.

There are two types of dollars you can earn in your business at any given time: steady and experimental.

Steady, as in, a product or service is selling well, and it’s been selling well for a while.

Experimental, as in, it feels risky to make the work, and/or you’re in some kind of new territory.

If you’re completely new to business, it’s all an experiment, but this might help you reframe some of your ambition in interesting ways, so keep going!

Let’s walk through my numbers, with my steady and experimental breakdowns from years past, so you can see what I’m talking about in practical terms.

In 2013, the biz income was 31% steady and 69% experimental.

The steadiness came from ghostwriting, previously launched programs, and a few coaching calls.

The experimenting came from creating a summer camp for adults and then selling the shit out of it.

That experimental nature paid off, so the pendulum swung to experimental in 2014.

High on just how much amazing and wonderful shit had panned out by experimenting, I went even more experiment crazy. 83% of the year’s income came from launching and holding Brand Camp, writing Introverts at Work, and hosting a few coaching sleepovers.

The remaining 17% of income came from steady, previously released or available sources: coaching, books, workshops, and ghostwriting.

And then the pendulum swung the other way.

In 2015, I swung wildly toward steady income, as Brand Camp the camp was like dropping a financial devastation bomb on my business.

65% of income came from coaching, previously-released programs and books, and ghostwriting.

Experiments made up only 35% of the year’s income, in which I repackaged the (admittedly brilliant) Brand Camp classes as the Business Blitz, launched a program, offered a 1-on-1 year-long coaching package, and founded three new workshops.

Less risk, more month-to-month work. Less launching, lower costs, more 1-on-1 clients.

And on and on it goes.

In 2016, I paid off the $43k in debt I’d accrued the year before, and in 2017 I released a bunch of new and exciting stuff: a different coaching package, lots of breathwork classes, and one-off courses to help peeps communicate and break up with their phones.

I’m always playing with the balance of how much work is entirely risky and how much is completely stable.

The trick of earning income through your business without being utterly bored or utterly broke lies in balancing your steady and your experimental income sources.

Further, steady work funds experimental work.

I’ve come to learn about valuing steady work the excruciatingly difficult way: by devaluing it and then scrambling to make ends meet at the last minute.

I always want to throw out what I’ve done and start over. I want everything I do to be an experiment. And yet.

The way to build a sustainable business is to innovate on some fronts while remaining stable on others.

2020 is about taking on a few more yearlong clients while playing with breathwork programs like The Softness Sessions, podcasting regularly, and keeping an ear to the ground for what’s next.

AND YOU, FRIEND! HOW DO YOU WANT THE NEXT FEW MONTHS TO PLAY OUT?

STEADY QUESTIONS:

Which income is steady in your business?

Which products or services consistently bring you income, month after month and year after year?

Which income-generating elements of your business do you want to keep?

Exactly how many clients do you need?

How many products do you need to sell, as your steady baseline?

The more you feel your health or your personal life is wobbly, unsteady, or overwhelming, the more likely it is that your business should be focused on steady income.

Steadiness requires time, energy, and consistency. Releasing a weekly podcast, showing your work on social media, sending regular e-mails and updates, responding to client inquiries in a timely manner, talking about what you’ve got for sale, and following up with inquiries: these are consistent practices that bear fruit over time.

If your work is consistent but sharing your work is not, that tweak alone might fix the income weirdnesses that ail you.

Once more, in case you missed it because you were skimming: if your work is consistent but sharing your work is not, that tweak alone might fix the income weirdnesses that ail you.

With steady work squared away, we move on to trying new things in experimental phases.

EXPERIMENT QUESTIONS:

What are you dying to try out in small doses?

Do you want to hold an event, start a class, write a book, release a project, try out a new product line, or offer an all new service? You can choose anything, but you’ve gotta choose one. Just one.

Do you want to collaborate with someone else? Do you want to try something entirely new and completely unlike what you’ve been doing all along?

What does the experimental thing look like, and what would be a first step toward making it happen?

If you’re like, ‘I can’t possibly talk about that while I also sell THOSE,’ think again.

I sell business coaching and also host regular gatherings for breathwork, both in person and on the internet. You can say those things are entirely unrelated, or you can say that when people opt in to hearing more from Kristen at Kristenkalp.com, it all fits. It’s all welcome.

Unless I start selling buckets of canned food and potable water for the apocalypse while spouting Biblical verses about the end times, because WOW I’ve been presenting myself as the opposite of that for a decade, I’ve got free rein to experiment with whatever has captured my fascination, has helped me, or has borne fruit in my life.

You get the same freedom, too.

You can absolutely be a photographer and a painter. A writer and a maker. A health coach and a reiki master. A coach and an author. A floral designer and a teacher. (Of course these are real examples of past coaching clients, by the way…)

You deserve the right to experiment. Period.

Further. Instead of deciding you have to give up X entirely in order to start Y, you can do both.

You can design t-shirts and see how they sell while you continue to be a doula, or plan larger and larger events while you keep on podcasting and mentoring colleagues in the wedding industry.

LIFE IS AN ‘AND.’

When we treat it as a series of ‘or’s, we limit our potential and clip our own wings. Whatever it is you want to do, yes you can do that AND you can keep on being a person with that degree or those experiences. ‘Or’ people end up switching focus a bunch of times, while ‘and’ people make room for ebb and flow. Some products come in, some go out. Some services last a long time, and others are offered only once.

You don’t have to do that mental and energetic thing whereby committing to a single project suddenly means committing to doing that same thing for the rest of your life.

Clipping your own wings is fucking tragic, so let’s not do that, okay? Let’s make some stuff, sell some stuff, and then repeat the process all over again.

And let’s not make any of this a BIG HUGE DEAL HOLY SHIT WOW while we’re at it! Amping up the energetic value of a new product or service is a sneaky asshole brain move to keep us stuck in fear and overwhelm.

STEADY AND EXPERIMENTAL QUESTIONS:

How much steady work do I need to sell each month to reach my enough number?

EXACTLY what sort of experiment do I want to make in the next six months?

And how much money will that make me, in a perfect world?

In a realistic world?

In a horrible world?

What you want to make as an experiment is entirely separate from how much money you want to make.

In fact, for our purposes, it’s safe to assume your experiments will cover costs and make very little money. That way, you’re as free as possible to make an amazing thing, and then to iterate on that thing with profitability in mind.

Assuming minimal profitability instead of a sold-out spectacular keeps you from blowing $20,000 on an experiment your first time out of the gate.

If you assume you’ll be making only your minimal costs back, what shape does the experiment take on?

It will generally get smaller and more doable when you limit the budget to something entirely reasonable. This is not downsizing your dream, but testing the viability of your dream before you swipe every credit card you’ve got to rent an arena. And a 7-piece orchestra. And a team of trained dogs. And a donut wall.

How can you build sources of revenue elsewhere in order to fund that project?

How can you use stable income sources to build experiments for yourself, and vice versa?

Can your experiment be added as a bonus gift or limited edition offering for something you already sell regularly?

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER AND TIE IT IN A BOW:

For the next six months, I’ll sell #___(quantity) of ________________ each month to reach my enough number.

I’ll also offer ____________ as an experiment.

#___ (quantity) are available, and will be released on this date: ___/___/___.

Again, this is a super-chill, low-key, NBD way to do business. You’ve just banked on your steady income while opening yourself up to an experiment, too — thereby assuring that you won’t die of boredom in the coming months!

If you dig this podcast episode and it helped you out, please leave a token of gratitude.

Tipping means I don’t fall into the despair of working for free, and it means you’ve actually enjoyed the material, too! We both win!

P.S. Here are six potentially devastating side effects of bringing your business dream to life — and why you should do it anyway.

The post Let’s talk Steady and Experimental income. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Finding Your Enough Number

Over the years, I’ve found that most business owners don’t know their enough number.  You know, your enough number: the precise amount of money it takes to cover your business and personal expenses, as well as account for taxes so you don’t suddenly owe ALL THE DOLLARS on April 15th.

In this special edition of the podcast, I’ll show you how to figure out precisely how much money you need your business to make each month, then break down exactly how much of your work you’ve got to sell to make that number happen. We’ll even account for taxes, and of course I’ll make you laugh the whole time.

Finding your enough number will help you prioritize your marketing activities, stop overwhelm in its tracks, and generally stop your asshole brain from going on and on about needing the vague and ominous “MORE” money.

Listen in below.

HEAR YE HEAR YE THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT.  This could be a paid class with a bunch of videos and bonuses and blah blah blah, but then you’d never actually do it because it would be one more thing you mean to do but never get around to completing.  (When asked to take a long-ass class about finances, 100% of humans suddenly have something much better to do.)

Please treat this like a no big deal, just-hanging-out-on-an-average-Tuesday sort of podcast, but grab a notebook and do the work.

If you’d like my help to go a step further and get yourself a rad workbook that will walk you through all of this, because diving into your financial health is intimidating AF, I’d be happy to help!

You can purchase this class in workbook form so that you actually complete the tasks instead of just listening.  Grab it for $10.

If $10 isn’t something you’ve got right now, we can also exchange value when you write a review, leave a rating, or send the podcast along to others.

Again, this is an experiment.  The trend right now is not just to give away simple things, but to make free courses and programs and challenges and audio and video and send 4,233 sales emails with timers and LIMITED OFFERS and tripwires and webinars and MY GOD IT’S EXHAUSTING.

This is me modeling more of what I would like to see in the world: fewer people doing things for exposure dollars.  Less content marketing, more making things that are truly useful and not simply a ploy to build an email list.  (I’m not giving this to you to build my email list because most freebies end up in your downloads folder, only to be found and deleted in roughly 2027.  And that does neither of us any good.)

P.S. This experiment is anti-capitalist in nature, as you get access to the goods first and pay second.  Translation: there’s TRUST here.

If this type of experiment is interesting to you, check out my anti-capitalist, pro-abundance-without-any-manifesting interview with Bear Hebert.

The post Finding Your Enough Number appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

How to overcome perfectionism and just keep shipping.

At its most simplified, you overcome perfectionism like this:

Make something up.

Get the word out about it.

Accept dollars for the thing you’ve made up.

(Of course that doesn’t always work, because have you seen the photo to the left and WOW do I suck at being posed sometimes.  But you keep going.)

This is an episode of That’s What She Said, my weekly podcast!  Listen in below, or read along for the transcript(ish).

This thing you’re sharing may or may not require: a website, an e-mail list, a social media presence, and/or a change of job.

It will most definitely involve: risk, leaving your comfort zone, asking for help, and failing. Lots.

We hide behind plans and structures, strategies and investors, sure things and experts, but there’s no real way to know how a thing you’ve made up will do until you introduce it to the world.

So go on, make the thing.
And then introduce it to the world.

“I’ve had many many many products, the vast majority of the things I’ve written, or created, the organizations I built fail, but the reason I’ve managed a modicum of success is because I just keep shipping.” — Seth Godin

We’re tempted to hide, to give up, or to go back to the old way of doing something once we’ve perceived something as a failure, but Seth tells us to just keep shipping.

That idea you’ve got? Ship it.

That thing you’re sitting on? Ship it.

The movement you want to start? Ship it.

Ship 10 things, and 2 will succeed.

That’s better than shipping 1 thing and having it fail, right?  It feels too big, too important, or too grand. It’s not ready, it needs more of this and less of that.

IT WILL NEVER FEEL READY. SHIP IT.

What are you perfecting, tweaking, or planning?

What’s been an idea lurking in your brain for the past few weeks, months, years, or decades?

What is it you want to do but you feel like you just freaking CAN’T because you’re too scared, because you don’t know enough, or because someone else has a slightly similar version and you’re afraid you’ll end up copying him or her, even though you know that’s a lame excuse and really, yours is completely different?

What do you need to set a deadline for, NOW?

I dare you to set it.

And then JUST FUCKING SHIP IT.

When we give one idea, concept, or blueprint too much attention, it can suck away our momentum, tank our mojo, and keep us from shipping.

Your brain will tell you that shipping and shipping and shipping does your clients a disservice. It will say that you should tweak and twerk, that your clients deserve only perfection, that they couldn’t possibly embrace the state of your creation as it is right now.

Only what if it launches and it’s missed the mark? Three months of work into it, that’s devastating.

Three years, or three decades into it? You’ll never recover.

That’s the part where you let your people have at it — whatever it is — and then you tweak.

You listen. You add features or streamline the whole venture. You let the dead bits fall to the wayside. You add life to the parts your peeps embrace. You let your clients inform your work, and your work inform your clients, in a glorious cycle that goes up and up and up and up into something way better than you could ever have created without their input.

When you’re holding tight to perfectionism, you’re not holding tight to your clients.

They deserve to see your work, not to be teased with it until it’s been beaten and battered to within an inch of its life.

When you’re striving for perfection, you can erode the fundamental spirit of a thing.

You lose an edge here, a corner there. You keep chipping away, and suddenly the life is gone.

Sometimes the spirit is in the flaws. Sometimes the charm is in letting us see your humanity. Sometimes the most sacred bits are the parts your detractors might call mistakes. Sometimes the best parts of a program are found in the outtakes.

The world makes a big fuss about perfection, but the act of iterating is infinitely more sexy. When you find yourself in the ‘make it perfect, make it perfect, make it perfect’ loop…ask yourself whether what you’re making hums with life.

Ask a friend who loves you where it sings and where it falls flat. Ask if the whole thing reflects who you are and where you are in the world, or if you’ve accidentally picked up someone’s else’s voice. (Or worse, someone else’s aspirations.) Ask them if it feels like you.

Does it feel like kids covered in mud, or dogs digging in the sand, or those moments when you first picked up the instruments of your profession and thought ‘This is what I want to do with my life…’? If it does, no further polishing is required.

Let us see the work. Let your slightly-wibbly bits sing out to ours and make new off-key-but-lovely music together.

We’d rather have a spirited something than a lifeless lump of perfection.

What have you been sitting on, waiting for, or polishing for way too long?

Where are you dragging your feet?

What can you get to market in the next 6 weeks?

No, really…if you give it your all, what can you get to market in the next 6 weeks? The next 8 weeks?

Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece, Guernica, in under a month. New York Times bestselling author Jane Green writes her novels in six months. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in less than thirty days. My favorite poems always fall out in twenty minutes or less.

Don’t discount something just because you haven’t wallowed in it for a decade or more.

P.S.  If you need help to overcome perfectionism and bring your work to the world, I’ve got three pay-what-you-can books to help!  Go Your Own Way: free yourself from business as usual is ideal if you’ve got no idea where to begin with owning a business.

Introverts at Work will help you explore selling and marketing techniques that make the most of your Quiet-with-a-capital-Q nature.

Calling to the Deep: business as a spiritual practice will help you figure out why your money issues affect your business, and your marital issues affect your bookings, and your own personal failings somehow seem to be far more pronounced the minute you opened your doors.  That’s normal.  Let’s talk about it.

The post How to overcome perfectionism and just keep shipping. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

The fine art of saying No.

I spend most of my time working with people who identify as female, so the fine art of saying “no” is a big deal. It’s one of the things we tackle early on in business coaching (waitlist for January is here), since building boundaries and defining what you will and will NOT tolerate will always bring you closer to your higher self and your truest work.

Let’s find some places where you can push things off your plate by saying “no,” and therefore make room for your most important work to come to light.

As always, these points are not about judging you or making you feel small, but about pointing a flashlight to areas of your own interiors that you might not have considered in a while. (Also as always, I only know about these because I’ve been there and unboxed shit-tons of gross debris while getting clear of each one.)

Psst!  This is an episode of That’s What She Said, my weekly podcast!  You can listen in below, catch up on all the episodes here, or keep reading for a transcript(ish).

Let’s start with 15 things to quit that you might not have considered:

+ e-mail lists you ‘should’ like or care about

+ perfection porn across all social media platforms (think flat lays, styled shoots, and product + photography so good that you want to buy $400 artisanal butter knives RIGHT NOW)

that one person you’re insanely jealous of and want to BE

+ Facebook, Twitter, or any social media platform that steals your life force

+ any committees, boards, groups, or clubs that give you a sense of dread or loathing when you think about them

+ any client who causes your solar plexus to contract when you see an e-mail from ’em in your inbox

+ unrealistic challenges that set you up for failure (i.e. 90 days of P90X in a row, what happens on day 91?)

+ the safety of doing the thing you’ve always done

+ going it alone

+ those services you bought but no longer use and now they just take $9.99 a month, every month

+ the news in forms that cause harm (video and text are VERY different animals)

+ sports

+ fashion

+ your bathroom scale (Related: I weigh 198+ pounds and 0% care.)

Further out, you can unfollow, unsubscribe, ignore, quit, and give up.

I’ve quit: following a mentor I paid $20k to work with; paying attention to a person I want to BE; Facebook; trying to buy clothes online; gluten, dairy, sugar, and garbage food in general at certain points when my health desperately needed attention. I’ve quit the Catholic church, and Christianity in general (related: coming out of the spiritual closet). I’ve even quit trying to explain my job to my mom.

I need to unfollow these people:

 

I need to unsubscribe from these people:

 

I don’t have to listen to this voice in my head any longer:

 

It’s okay to quit paying attention to:

With quitting, you’ll naturally come up against making sure that you reaaaaaaaally need to quit. I’ve tried buying clothes online again recently, and failed. That means I’ve returned hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothing in the past few weeks because sometimes, we need to be sure the rules we’ve made are still true. This is a normal and healthy part of human behavior, not a reason to flog yourself for any reason. (Related: your shame is not interesting.)

Give up. On purpose.

I’ve given up on having an empire, building a team, making 7 figures, being on Oprah’s radar, doing more than 2 speaking gigs a year, creating big huge expensive scalable programs, and trying to connect with the masses instead of 1-on-1, which is my unique area of bliss and expertise.

Mostly I learned about what I needed to give up on by trying to do each of those things and then wondering why I resented my work so much at every turn.

Seething resentment is generally a sign that you’re on the wrong path.

Your turn! I need to give up on:

 

No more ____________ is is a way of saying no.

We all have habits and patterns that repeat, usually unconsciously, until we bring them to light. Let’s drag some of those patterns into the open so you can choose to keep them — or not.

+ No more downloading freebies you never read.

+ No more signing up for services you ‘should’ use.

+ No more trying to make your dreams bigger or smaller in order to fit in.

+ No more toning it down to please _________ (whether that’s a real person or a voice in your head, still applies).

+ No more censoring yourself to avoid being not-liked.

+ No more sticking to rules you’ve had since you were small that no longer make sense or serve you.

+ No more reading books all the way to the end just because you started them.

+ No more numbing out with food/alcohol/drugs/reality TV/other. (Related: is it nourishing or numbing?)

+ No more pretending ________ doesn’t matter, because it does. (In most business-related things, your SOUL is the thing you’re pretending doesn’t matter, which is particularly painful.)

+ No more doing things the way you’ve been doing them because that’s the way they’ve always been done.

Your turn!  I’m declaring NO MORE to:

Finally, there’s the big one. The one person, place, or thing that comes to mind when I say there’s a thing you need to quit, stop doing, or saying no to.

You don’t have to tell me or anyone else, for that matter, but it is helpful to admit it to yourself.

The big thing I need to admit is:

May you give up, quit, unfollow, unsubscribe, and cancel whatever no longer serves you.

May you find ways to bring your truest work to light.

And may you master the fine art of saying “no,” starting right now.

P.S. Reclaim your energy, become a quitter.

The post The fine art of saying No. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

10 ways to beat overwhelm as a biz owner. FAST.

Tis the season for overwhelm and that busy feeling increasing exponentially, so let’s dive into some simple ways to head overwhelm off at the pass.  You can read and click through below, or listen in to this week’s episode of That What She Said!

Make space.

You can make space physically, by clearing your desk or processing orders. You can also make space mentally, by choosing to pursue one task at a time.

Turn off allll the notifications on your phone and desktop. If you need help breaking your phone addiction, Space will help.  Find out more here.

Delete all the stuff in your Downloads folder. It’s mostly stuff you don’t know what to do with, and now you can take it off your plate entirely.

Delete programs, PDFs, books, freebies, or downloads you don’t want, are never going to use, or no longer need. Yes, you paid money for that online Bobsledding course, but you still live in Florida, so maybe it’s best to admit defeat and move on.

Prioritize.

If you’re constantly running around and asking yourself what to do when, it’s probably time to get yourself some priorities. Namely: if you run a business, you want to keep business coming in.

Write up your six-month marketing calendar.  I’ll show you how.

Send an email to your list. (No shame, no matter how long it’s been or if it’s been never!  Check out How to F*&(ing Communicate if you don’t know what to say or where to start! Here’s how to start an email list if you don’t yet have one.

Whittle.

You can’t work for 12 hours and be at home taking care of your family for 12 hours and and run a casual marathon and write your book and listen to 48 podcasts today, because there are only 24 hours in a day.

What’s most important about your work day, and how can you best get that work done?

If this is your biggest struggle, check out The Quietly Subversive 3-Hour Work Day, episode 204 of the podcast!

It can also help to clear up your desktop by organizing folders and deleting what’s not necessary in this moment. If you’re one of those people with 4,822 unread messages — it might be time to declare email bankruptcy by deleting everything and sending a quick note to your contacts saying that you’re starting over.

Schedule.

Schedule recurring tasks. Yes, you really can schedule time to check email or write posts or edit your work or…whatever!  Here’s everything I know about time management.

Keep a calendar instead of a to-do list. A to-do list means you’ll knock off the easy stuff and move the gross stuff to tomorrow. A calendar means you’ve got it on lockdown and it will get done, no matter how much you don’t want to do it.

Finally, step away from the screen when your job is done. Find out more about the quietly subversive 3-hour work day.

Make space.

Prioritize.

Whittle.

Schedule.

You got this.

P.S. Breathwork for Overachievers might be helpful, too! This active meditation will help you move through overwhelm within sacred space.

The post 10 ways to beat overwhelm as a biz owner. FAST. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Healing doesn’t always hurt.

The most painful parts of healing happen at the beginning of the process, when we’re shedding old skins that have calcified, or crawling out of boxes where we were contorted into cramped positions for lots of time, or walking with a limp because we’re still bleeding out from several wounds at once.

This is an episode of That’s What She Said, my weekly podcast! Keep reading or listen in below.

As we staunch the bleeding; as we shed the skins; as we move around and learn to shake out our wings, we soften and grow.

We start out shedding the debris that’s hardest, structurally — walls, gates, and shells — and move into ever softening variations over time. Imagine pulling sticks and bricks over your softest bits, then imagine pulling tomato skins over them. That’s how healing unfolds over time. It gets far less brutal, stabby, and hard as the years go by.

We consciously clear the old shit that needs to be cleared, tossing it onto the great compost pile of life, so we are free to push through the soul’s soil in new and tender ways.

The new and tender soil pushing doesn’t hurt. It’s an expression of life that’s far more lovely and new and invigorating than we can imagine when we’re on the bathroom floor, weeping, certain that life is over and nothing will ever change.

(Spoiler alert: life is not over. And everything will change.)

I promise healing gets better — softer, lovelier, and more full of wonder — with consistent courage and hard work.

My god, the softness that’s possible.

The depths that are possible.

The waking up in wonder that’s possible.

I’m telling you, after having slogged through two decades of depression, that it’s possible.

It’s possible to wake up and not worry about how you’re going to find the energy to shower or to eat breakfast or brush your teeth today, where once that consumed the first hour of waking.

It’s possible to do your work with far more enthusiasm and far less effort, so that what took you three hours a few years ago takes you thirty minutes today. And it’s possible for that work to be better and more nourishing than the work of years ago, too.

I promise it’s possible for depression to leave you.

It can. It does. It might take meds and new meds and acupuncture and dietary changes and working out and cannabis and trial and error and hopelessness and breathwork and days that are so horrible you’ve blocked them from memory, but it can leave your system. It can be cleared.

I can’t promise that I’ll never be depressed again, but I can promise that I’ve learned the language of my mind and body to such an extent that I’m only 3 steps into The Dark Woods before I make changes, instead of waking up 30 miles into The Dark Woods and then battling my way out.

Over the weekend, I texted Bear that in the past month or so, I’ve started to take for granted that I feel good when I wake up. When we begin to take something for granted, it’s the new normal.

It’s possible to recover from The Big Enormous Darkness so completely that you eventually wake up and feel good, with no weird remnants of the big dark hanging on to your body, mind, or spirit. It’s possible to feel so good that you make a new normal, and that new normal is light and requires only a cup of coffee to reach its maximum potential.

I promise that sometimes it gets better for no discernible reason, lest you think you have to earn healing like you’d earn a master’s degree.

Sometimes the season finishes and the fog lifts with no effort on your part.

Spring arrives.

The beach opens for summer.

The book is finished.

The neighbors move.

The kids graduate.

Seasonal resolution is a gift, so please embrace it without any guilt.

I promise the path is worth the price.

At the very least, those of us who are committed to healing and growing, experimenting and failing, get to see far more of the world than our inner basements and a dusty collection of untouched emotional boxes.

We don’t live in fear of ourselves, and that is a rare trait in the modern human.

To put it another way: I am not afraid of myself.

I have been to the basement and in the attic, up on the roof and all around the internal property. I have seen my darkest, worst sides, and I’m aware of my most flattering angles.

I am not afraid of myself.

As the fear of ourselves falls away, we’re far less likely to fall into hoarding of any kind. We stop trying to protect what we already have at the expense of everything we haven’t yet seen — and so we’re far more likely to make changes as they’re offered by life circumstances, rather than three decades too late.

We live with fewer regrets because when you have confronted your biggest pain, your deepest secrets, and your shame, you travel lighter and further than ever before. Inside, outside, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

I promise the growing is far more pleasure than pain.

Whether you want to learn to be in your body, enjoy sex more, clear emotional debris, receive more of life’s goodness, or give up on the ‘next level‘ of business and enjoy the phase you already inhabit: there is pleasure waiting.

Sure, there are rough patches, but those rough patches are often helped along by drinking plenty of water and going to bed earlier than usual. (I wish I was making this up or exaggerating, but I’ve often found solutions to my own bullshit by going to bed with the sun.)

Your growth creates resiliency without any extra effort on your part, and that resiliency is tended through sleep and rest.

I can *also* promise there will be resistance.

Whenever we know something is important — a conversation, a workshop, an event, or a habit — we resist the shit out of it.

We pretend we’re too busy to make it, or it will ‘only’ be a little money we’re wasting if we cancel, or we’ll do it next week/month/year, or we don’t have to participate because X. (Where X is usually something really clever like, ‘You deserve it!’ or ‘You need a rest anyway.’)

Resistance is common for everything important, and it doesn’t stop just because you’ve been doing something for a long time.

I’ve been doing breathwork weekly for a bunch of years, and instead of running toward a recent training weekend with arms open, I almost ran home scared.

Resistance is normal, but it’s not something we have to give in to.

We can listen to the asshole brain voices that say we’ll do it ‘later’ or we ‘don’t need to do it’ or ‘there’s probably nothing to learn anyway,’ and then laugh.

We can observe the fear doing its fear thing and then show up anyway. Likewise, we can move toward what we know is important instead of downplaying it, pretending it’s not calling to us, or acting as if it’s no big deal. (Related: coming out of the spiritual closet.)

I promise you will wake up one day and notice the ways the landscape has shifted.

Maybe you push through resistance for one more day, and tomorrow it will disappear entirely.

Maybe you used to trudge for forty-three minutes up You’re Not Enough mountain to get to your truest work, and now it’s only three minutes. Progress!

Maybe you used to take three hours to write to your peeps, and now it only takes two. Progress!

Maybe you used to associate your work with your worth, or give up on selling after you mentioned a thing once, or refuse to ask for money owed you, or trust doctors with poor solutions instead of putting your own health at the center of your quest for wellness.

One day, you realize you don’t do those things any longer, because you’ve been training the emotional muscles required to withstand greater and greater challenges.

You’ve been doing emotional weightlifting this whole time, and no one thought to stop and say they’re proud of you, because emotional weightlifting is mostly invisible and internal.

So right now, lemme say: I’m so proud of you. I see how hard you’re working — yup you, just by virtue of being here — and you are doing such a good job.

SUCH a good job.

Which brings me to my last point.

I promise that you’re making progress so long as you’re committed to making progress.

It’s almost impossible to see this when everything appears to be standing still. But the world is never, ever standing still. We’re always moving in the direction of growth or of decay, and simply choosing to be committed to growth for its own sake is enough to ensure that progress is happening.

When we step into the world in the spring, we know things are happening below the surface for weeks and weeks. Then, one glorious morning, the daffodils burst open and spring arrives. The patience through the standing up in soil, the lengthening, and the creation of buds isn’t so obvious in humans, so we tend to think we’re useless or hopeless and should throw in the towel.

Please, don’t.

So long as you’re willing to wrestle with and to explore your interiors, progress is assured.

So long as you’re willing to show up and do your work in the world today, progress is assured.

So long as you’re strengthening your emotional muscles, one day at a time, progress is assured.

Even if you’re drowning in emotions or emails or both — please don’t give up on yourself, on your interiors, or on your own progress.

And for what it’s worth: I’m so very proud of you.

P.S. As you heal, you hide less.  Here are 29 ways to stop hiding.

The post Healing doesn’t always hurt. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

The Quietly Subversive 3-Hour Work Day.

I’ve had a secret for a bunch of years, but I’ve felt too much SCARY BEING JUDGED FEAR to share it in any sort of meaningful or worthwhile way.

Here goes: most of my work days last for three hours or less.

I’ve been consciously shaping a shorter work day for myself for years now.

Before you form a mob and come at me with pitchforks because I’m such a spoiled brat, lemme tell you how this started.

For a bunch of years, I was struggling with depression. I also had worsening-but-undiagnosed thyroid issues. For about eighteen months there, I had both extremely intense thyroid issues and clinical depression.  (Story of how I slooooowly healed my thyroid here.)

Translation: naps were not optional. Getting out of bed and showering were serious achievements.

Not like, ‘Hehe I know! Showering is a pain in the ass.’ More like, ‘I have to lie down now that I’ve taken a shower since my body is experiencing a power failure.’

Where I could once happily work for eight to ten hours a day, the picture of productivity (see: capitalism), I found myself struggling to retain focus. I could only write for a few minutes at a time. I had trouble crafting zippy and witty responses to clients.

My brain fog was so severe that if you asked me to describe it in any detail, I would burst into tears and wobble my mouth at you like a sad, ancient animal with no will to live.

I was scared that my brain would never recover and therefore I’d have to give up writing forever.

Naturally, I decided to go down fighting. I cut my hours back again and again, beating myself up all the while: I’ll work until 4 pm. Until 3 pm. Until 2 pm. You can’t handle working until 2, really?

Okay fine, I’ll work until lunch. I was so embarrassed to be so ‘sick’ and ‘broken,’ but that’s how I ultimately came to set up a lasting schedule. (See also: your brain is an asshole and your shame is not interesting.)

I’ve currently got a 9:30 to Noon routine. That’s my time for getting absolutely everything important done: writing, podcast recording, emailing, selling, coaching, planning, and the like. Only two and a half hours to do it.

In the afternoon, I do tasks that don’t require as much of my magic: scheduling, uploading, downloading, and updating. That lasts for at least half an hour, sometimes up to 2 hours, but consists mostly of tasks that are optional or that take place away from my computer. I schedule time to do breathwork, cook dinner, stretch, pick up library books, and otherwise take damn good care of myself most afternoons. On Fridays, I coach until about 3 pm because I know I’ll have the weekend to recover if I overextend myself.

What I’ve found over the past few years of working-at-a-screen less and working-by-taking-good-notes-in-the-world more is fucking SHOCKING.

The softer I can be with myself, the more I can get done.

Not soft like ‘fuck it,’ but soft like ‘let’s do our best with clear priorities and well-defined tasks.’

When you’re only working for a few hours, you have no choice but to prioritize. There’s no time for clicking on a rabbit hole about author’s diaries, fiddling with Spotify playlists, scrolling on Instagram, squeezing in some online shopping, or eyeing the competition. No time for answering texts, fiddling with group chats, or distracting yourself with household tasks that are suddenly quite urgent because WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK IF I HAVEN’T TAKEN OUT THE RECYCLING TODAY.

You’ve only got time for your work.

If you’re like, HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS MAGIC TELL ME HOW…let’s do this.

First, you’ll need to prioritize the shit out of your work life.

Let’s think of your work in three categories: magic, mogul, and muggle.

Magic is the work that ONLY you can do.

No one else can write your books, speak at your gigs, do your coaching sessions, or…whatever it is that people pay you (and only you) to do. Bear cannot send me to one of his DJ gigs, ’cause I’ll just play Ace of Base’s ‘The Sign’ on repeat until everyone goes home. That’s his magic.

My magic is writing, editing, communicating with peeps via the podcast, coaching, and holding or planning breathwork classes.

Magic is scheduled for your most productive time of day.

In my case, that’s first thing, which also keeps me from wading into my inbox and getting distracted by whatever is waiting for me each morning. Magic is blocked off for 1-2 hours on any given work day.

Most people skip their magic 100% of the time.

They try to schedule it for big blocks of uninterrupted time — preferably on a desert island — and allow every other urgent-but-not-deeply-important task to eat away at their work time. If you’ve ever dreamed of doing all your work Somewhere Far Away With No Interruptions for 7 to 30 days, you know this predicament well.

Making magic a daily activity changes the nature of your business and ups your quality of life significantly.

If I tried to shove all my most awesome talents into use for 6 hours on Friday, then left the rest of my week to things like spreadsheets, updates, and answering emails within 40 seconds of their arrival in my inbox, I would hate my life. (If you currently hate your business, I’ll bet that this lack-of-magic-time has something to do with it!)

If you’re like, ‘Okay, but uh…WTF is my magic, Kristen? What should go into that time for me?’

Some questions to suss out your magic:

What is it that only you can do?

What will make 5-years-from-now you proud?

What will move the ball forward on the project you’ve given the most significance at the moment?

Hint: that will rarely be answering emails the minute they come in, returning phone calls within 30 seconds of receiving them, or putting your best work at the least alive part of your day. My most alive part happens when I wake up, so I hit the breakfast train and get to work as quickly as possible. Some people say you MUST work out before you sit before a screen, but that takes up too much of my magic time.

Next, there’s moguling. This involves any and every activity you do to bring money into your business.

That’s selling, marketing, planning a launch, following up with potential clients, talking with potential clients, and letting current clients know about referral perks of any kind. (For example: refer a coaching client to me for KK on Tap and you get a free 1-hour coaching call! There are 5 spots left.)

If you’re afraid of selling or marketing — or simply new to it — you’ll naturally push this off until it’s absolutely necessary. Read: you’re out of money.

When you can make moguling a habit — even for 10 minutes a day — you make massive changes in how you perceive and talk about your business.

You promote your work before it’s crunch time. You respond to clients in a timely-but-not-instant timeframe. You handle any issues that come up before they’re a big deal, and you do so without trying to batch every last miserable marketing task imaginable into a single day at a time when you’re completely out of cash.

Eventually, you don’t avoid these activities because they are a tiny stripe of time built into your day between magic and muggling. They are not a dreaded task that sucks all of your mental energy, or an enormous task that feels far too stressful to even begin. Consistent workday moguling is one of the keys to how I get a great deal of work done in a small period of time without freaking out about how I should be doing more (and more and more and more and more).

To suss out moguling in your life:

How often do you mention your products and services to: your email list? To social media? To those you meet?

How many times do you follow up with potential clients before assuming they’re not interested?

If your work is limited in some capacity, are the number of available spots in your calendar extremely clear upon visiting your website? (i.e. 5 KK on Tap coaching spots are left for this year! Learn more here.)

Do you keep an updated spreadsheet of your actual and projected income for your business?

Do you keep a regularly-updated marketing calendar, and then stick to it?

Here’s how to make a marketing calendar if that’s new to you! Also if you’re like, OH GOD HOW DO I DO THESE THINGS, pick up a copy of Go Your Own Way: free yourself from business as usual.

If you’d like to begin to cultivate the habit of communicating with your peeps — i.e. to send a damn newsletter already — I’ll walk you through how to do that without wanting to curl up and die in my How to F*&(ing Communicate course.

Finally, there’s muggling. These are non-magical, ordinary tasks.

This is the great time sink of life: the scheduling of appointments, the answering of emails, the attending of meetings, and, frequently, the avoiding of much harder activities. Most peeps I coach tend to give this category about 90% of their total resources on any given day. (In case you’re like, ‘NO NOT ME I NEVER MUGGLE:’ scrolling on your phone is muggling 100% of the time.)

We all know that muggling is often urgent, which is how it skips to the front of our to-do lists. It also requires the least amount of risk on our part, as it’s generally shuffling messages around, making plans for everyday tasks, and staying afloat in life without making any waves.

If you’re risk avoidant or generally feeling tired on any given day, it’s absolutely normal for muggling to show up and take over your business life. Let’s change that.

To suss out muggling in your life:

Which everyday activities take up most of your time?

How many times a day do you check your email?

How many times a day do you respond to your email — because checking and responding are two different things?

How much time do you dedicate to taking care of everyday business needs, versus working on projects and tasks that only you can do?

Which recurring tasks need to be scheduled so that you don’t keep missing the time necessary to complete them each day/month/week? (Here’s everything I know about time management.)

Which muggling tasks can be outsourced to another human or batched on a regular timeframe (i.e. checking email and voicemail twice a day instead of every 2 minutes)?

The good news is, it’s fairly easy to steal time back from muggling.

The first and most important step to having a shorter work day is to STOP WORKING WHEN YOU’RE DONE WORKING.

If you only check your email twice a day for 20 minutes at a time, you’ll free up those hours where you’re sitting at the computer not-working, but feeling guilty about how little you actually have to accomplish today.

If you’ve handled your obligations, completed your magical time, and let your peeps know how much of your work is on offer at the moment, YOU ARE FREE TO MOVE ABOUT THE WORLD.

You’ll have to give up a tremendous amount of guilt to make this a shorter work day thing happen.

Ah yes, the guilt: I know it well. My friends are working so hard at their 9 to 5’s, shouldn’t I be miserable, too? My friend in corporate America answers more than 200 emails a day, shouldn’t I be able to answer my emails immediately in order to compensate for how few I handle? My other friend in corporate America is in meetings for 3 to 7 hours a day, so shouldn’t I be sitting at my computer to — in some strange and energetic way — atone for the fact that I’ve got my own business and could be doing anything at all right now?

You don’t have to curb your freedom because those you love aren’t as free.

To put it another way: the belief that we should be working for eight hours a day, five days a week, at a screen, without fail, is bullshit.

When you get softer, you can give yourself many permissions in order to work through your asshole brain’s nagging about how lazy and useless you are.

These might help you unlock a shorter work day:

Permission to work for as long as you have legitimate activities to complete — and then close up shop for the day.

Permission to schedule as much or as little work as you can handle on any given day — and in any given season of life.

Permission to keep your business as big or small as you’d like — particularly small, which gets shamed by internet gurus the world over.

Permission to give up scrolling, procrastinating, and other forms of bullshit in order to do your work and then get on with your day.

Permission to admit that screens are only a small part of many businesses! If you’re a dancer, dance. If you’re a painter, paint! If you’re a writer, write. On notebooks and away from screens whenever possible.

Let go of trying to control everything, or trying to find the thread that leads to all systems coming together perfectly, all ills disappearing, all boxes being checked, all signs pointing to go, all beings blissful at once. (This is much harder than it seems, and will require continued effort.)

If you’d like to experience my particular magic, look no further than The Softness Sessions, which start THIS WEEK!

The Softness Sessions will help you take the first steps toward being softer with yourself — with your schedule, with your productivity, and with what you can achieve on any given day — with the help of weekly wisdom throwdowns and breathwork.

Breathwork is an active 3-part meditation that is like a scrubby brush for your soul. It cleans up emotional residue, inherited or outdated thought patterns, and habitual actions. All you’ve got to do is lie down and breathe.

I’ll walk you through the common areas where we humans encounter major tangles — loneliness, mess, doubt, wandering the wilderness, steadiness, and joy — and then we’ll move through each one with breathwork.

You’ll come out the other side less attached to guilt, shame, fear, and the bullshit that’s lived in you for so long that you can’t see it anymore.

Expect to feel brighter, lighter, and softer at the end of the sessions.  Buy now!

 

P.S. How to *actually* change the whole damn world.

The post The Quietly Subversive 3-Hour Work Day. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Nourishing or Numbing? One question to shift it all.

I’ve been hitting you with the big guns lately — deep questions and lots of self aware examining in longer-than-usual podcasts — so this week I thought I’d give you a single question reframe that can set your whole life in order.

Is it nourishing or numbing?

This question applies to each and every habit, task, relationship, boundary, pattern, or activity you complete.

Consider your commute, your screen habits, your food habits, your travel habits, your self care routines, and your time spent with those you love: nourishing or numbing?

At a deeper level, consider your business practices, the information you consume, the books you read, the shows you watch, and the people you interact with on a regular basis: nourishing or numbing?

The goal, of course, is to do less numbing and more nourishing.

Only of course it’s not that simple. We humans don’t magically switch off our numbing patterns just because we realize they’re numbing, nor do we naturally move toward genuine nourishment until we are in deep, nearly unspeakable pain. For me, seeking nourishment only took losing 40 grand, going through a divorce, battling depression for two decades, and waking up every day feeling like I was being suffocated by despair, as well as my thyroid giving out in a spectacular way. We’re pushed toward fast and quick solutions when we most desperately need deep care, deep rest, and deep understanding.

When we’re malnourished — whether at the physical level or the soul level — our brains send signals to get us some quick fixes and some time off.

We often reach for more and more numbing agents when we need nourishment most.

The more stressed or tired or depleted or frustrated we are, the more numbing we do — and repeat, and deepen the cycle, and repeat again, but this time with more retail therapy! And pop-up sales and coupons and free shipping! BEHOLD, I HAVE A WHOLE NEW WARDROBE AND MY SOUL FEELS FIIIIIIIIIIINE. ISH. (FINE-ISH. I’ll just be over here, weeping into my new sequined jumpsuit.)

Life can quickly become a numbing pattern spread across every waking moment, only now we need to find a way to numb the discomfort that comes with mounting credit cards bills as well…

How do you begin to build more nourishing habits, patterns, practices, and activities into your life?

You properly identify an activity as nourishing or numbing.

Only that identifying bit is really, really tricky.

Most activities can be nourishing or numbing, depending on circumstances and context.

Take, for example, dessert. If you’re working on your fifth gallon of ice cream this evening, we both know you’re numbing. But if you’ve been working incredibly hard to eat the most nutrient-dense foods on earth and you’re celebrating a milestone of some kind, that same ice cream can be absolutely nourishing.

This is why self care and soul care can be so tricky. We humans are smart enough to disguise numbing agents as nourishment, and we can use nourishing activities to numb when we do them excessively.

When you obsessively check email but don’t process it — meaning that you read but don’t respond to messages — you’re numbing. And probably working yourself into a panic, besides.

This also happens with marketing activities and making asks, which can be numbing when you turn them over and over (and over and OVER) in your mind instead of actually doing them. But when you show up, make asks, provide simple calls to action for your peeps, and stand in your worth (without making your work your worth)…that’s nourishing for your work all the way down.

Likewise, watching Brene Brown’s special on Netflix is nourishing AF. (If you haven’t yet watched it, HALT YOUR LIFE AND DO THAT NOW PLEASE.) Watching 22 episodes of anything back to back while lying on the couch and consuming DoorDash’s parade of fried foods, not so much.

A hot bath: nourishing. Hiding from your family in the bathroom for 6.3 hours during Christmas, armed with a bag of Doritos and your sound-proof headphones: numbing.

Getting 6-pack abs would be nourishing for me, since that would be making wildly new life patterns and choices, while it would be numbing for someone who has had an eating disorder and workout addiction.

You get the idea.

As you go about your day, take note of what is nourishing and what is numbing.

If you ‘don’t have time’ to notice, you’re numbing exceptionally hard today.

Days ‘off’ are not necessarily nourishing.

Days ‘off’ often involve doing work that isn’t done during the usual work week, so days ‘off’ are really catch-all times for doing chores offline.

On a recent ‘day off,’ I did five loads of laundry, cleaned the bathroom, went grocery shopping, hit up the pharmacy and the co-op for a few items, walked Neville, vacuumed my car, cleaned the kitchen, cooked dinner, and picked up my neighbor’s mail because they were on vacation. And I don’t even have kids.

That workload gets ever more unwieldy as you add more people to the mix, whether they’re friends, kids, relatives, roommates, or pets!

When was the last time you had a full, no responsibilities day off?

Can you schedule one right now for the near future, even if it’s simply sitting at home and kicking everyone else out of the house so you can hear yourself think?

How can you consciously create — and then protect — space to simply BE in your life without having to do a long list of chores, tasks, or errands?

Your brain will probably pop in with simple solutions and half-steps, here. What if we got rid of that one chore? What if we allowed ourselves twenty whole minutes to breathe some fresh air outside?

Please, please, don’t fall for the half-steps that don’t offer any long-term gains and only keep you paddling along, just-barely-not-drowning, at the surface.

You deserve better than an inner auction of your own time and value that ends in compromising all over the place.

I asked you how you can get a day to yourself — and your brain immediately called that impossible. It probably offered a few minutes as a compromise.

I asked when you can simply BE in your life — and your brain suggested you download some kind of app and start a new practice, which is one more thing to check off of your to-do list and/or beat yourself up for not doing.

Being — or practicing the art of being present — is a completely free, no apps required activity that involves no screens and probably your pets. When I say ‘being,’ I mean stepping outside and feeling the air on your face. Possibly looking at the sky, or maybe sipping a beverage, but not if that’s too much work or if you don’t feel like looking at the sky today.

To put this another way: it doesn’t count if you don’t enjoy it.

Busyness is often a numbing mechanism.

You eventually become afraid of slowing down, since you know that there’s a shit-ton of unprocessed emotion waiting for you in the silence. At some level, you don’t WANT to hear your thoughts or notice your feelings.

Maybe it’s a conscious decision to speed up and stay in motion, or maybe it’s a subconscious fear that if you actually listen to yourself, you’ll have to make some changes. Small changes, like scheduling yourself to have a little more time that’s not ‘on,’ or big changes, like ending a relationship or quitting your job.

LOOKING busy is also a numbing mechanism.

When you force yourself to sit at a screen and ‘work,’ even with nothing in particular to do, you’re feeding the part of your brain that’s been conditioned to tie your work to your worth, and numbing the Very Much Alive parts of you shouting that your work is done for today, and you’re free to move about the world as you please. (We’ll talk about that in detail in next week’s podcast!)

Where are you remaining busy to avoid feeling your feelings or having a confrontation with another person?

Where are you remaining busy in order to ‘put in your time’ for all those friends who work corporate jobs and don’t have the freedom to walk away from their desks right now?

When do you consciously slow down, and how often does that happen?

What would halting the busyness in your life look like if you started with being 10% less busy?

What would you cancel, ignore, or stop doing if I said your busyness would cost you $1,000 a week? $10,000?

(I’m making up that $10,000 number so you can see exactly how much would be *on the table and scheduled for deletion* if you had to pay a great deal of money to remain busy. Your priorities: in order.)

If you chronically describe yourself as ‘busy,’ slowing down is the first step. Only HOW do you slow down and it’s SCARY and UGH I have to much to DO, Kristen — I know. That brings me to my next point.

Breathwork is nourishing because it’s soul care and self care, combined.

It maxes out at taking an hour of your day and can only be done once per day, so it can’t take over your life. Breathwork is a little like going to the gym or eating well or going for a walk outside even though the weather isn’t perfect — you’ll feel better in the end. But brain is like, NO EAT THE ICE CREAM.  AND SIT HERE UNTIL THE END OF TIME STREAMING MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY FILMS IF THAT’S WHAT YOU REALLY NEED.   

You’ll feel both better and lighter after breathwork, but starting a practice can be intimidating. Like, how long do I do it for, and when, and what happens if I have questions?

The Softness Sessions are all about introducing you to breathwork in small, steady ways.

We’ll build your stamina week by week for six weeks, then meet live for a full-length group breathwork session on October 29th.

You’ll get yourself some soul-level nourishment every step of the way.

I’ve condensed everything I know about human life universals — loneliness, mess, doubt, wandering the wilderness, steadiness, and joy — into potent and dense audio magic, then added breathwork to the end. (And made a book to ship your way the minute you join.)

We’ll rebuild the muscles that have atrophied from numbing all over the place, and we’ll reconnect you with…you.

Your voice.

Your intuition.

Your desires and dreams.

Your truest work.

Your deepest, most wild and amazing possibilities.

We’ll stop the takeover of numbing once a week starting September 19th, and see what happens as a result.

If you dig my work and are even remotely curious — and I’m guessing both of those things are true because you’re here, right now — pick up The Softness Sessions n-o-w.

P.S. Why breathwork?  And how to reclaim joy even if you’re currently miserable, sad, and/or angry.

The post Nourishing or Numbing? One question to shift it all. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Hiding isn’t the answer. (I wish it would be, though.)

Before we dive in to this week’s podcast episode, I’d like to acknowledge that the lessons here have taken a bunch of years to condense into anything even remotely resembling words. My first impulse when it comes to facing the world is to hide 100% of the time. I prefer to hermit and retreat and withdraw. Those are tendencies I actively push against and question on an almost-daily basis. So.

I know, you’d rather hide.

At a business level, it’s scary to let your work be seen. You’ve heard that ‘if you build it, they will come,’ and they’re not coming. Maybe you should…build it again? Pin ever-more-complicated options to Pinterest and save up to give someone ten grand and solve it for you? Hope for the best and get a second job?

Or you say you’re ready to take on more clients or sell more work, but you can’t bring yourself to respond to emails, phone calls, or inquiries when they come in.

What’s wrong with you, and with your business? There must be something so secretly, desperately wrong that everyone but you can see it, right?

Nope!

You’re probably a master of hiding.

Here are some really fun, reaaaaaally smart ways I’ve hidden my work:

For years, only print versions of books were available, even though ebook versions are easier for me to host and sell — and also more profitable. (Pay what you can for any of my books here.)

For (again) years, I consistently forgot to read my poems on the podcast or share them anywhere at all. Did my bio identify me as a poet? Yup. Did that translate to my sharing more?  Not without effort.

I used to mention something once or twice, casually, and then assume it was a failure because it didn’t sell out instantaneously. LOOKING AT YOU, EVERY ENTREPRENEUR EVER!

Repetition is a kindness.

Everyone has too many emails, too many mundane tasks, too many notifications, and not enough brain space to see, love, read about, and buy a product in one fell swoop.  It’s often the third or fourth mention that garners any real interest, and only firm deadlines that make people respond in a decisive way.  (Also if you’d like to break up with your phone, meet Space, a 21-day email class to help you do just that!)

I used to think no one wanted to hire me if they didn’t respond to my offerings immediately, even after I began repeating myself again and again.

I routinely have people sign up for coaching who tell me how many years they’ve been following me. Current record: nine.

It’s a long game, people. (Also, there are six coaching spots left and you should talk to me about working together, okay? K@kristenkalp.com)

For years, I ended my talks about things for sale in question marks (I’m coaching?) and only noticed it later when listening to the podcast.  I. AM. SO. AWESOME.

I also used to rush sales talk and then relax when I got to the free stuff. Only That’s What She Said is an ad-free, not-sponsored podcast, so I have every right to talk about how to hire me and purchase my work within it. (You have the right to do the same with the things you offer, too.)

Here are some ways you might be hiding in business: