Hello, beautiful Pursuit with Purpose listeners. I am very excited right now because this is my first of many solo episodes that I’m going to be doing every single week. So in honor of doing my podcast for one year, if you didn’t know, we just celebrated our one year anniversary. I’m going to start adding in a second shorter episode each week with just yours truly. So we’ll still have our interviews that come out every Monday, but now on Thursdays, I’m going to start doing an episode that’s a little shorter with just myself. So sometimes these episodes will be a little check in on my life and my business, but more often, they’ll be something where I can share a lesson that I’ve learned in life recently, or a little debrief on the episode that came out on Monday with the person that I interviewed, share some of my behind the scenes of what I learned from that episode or things that I think would be helpful for you in order to become your best self too. So I think these will be really fun, and just a more conversational kind of coffee chat way for us to get to know each other better and for us to grow together, because I realize that I really want this podcast and this community in general to feel like a conversation, not a one sided guru type of thing where I’m interviewing people and you have to listen to us. I really want it to feel like we’re buds and that you have a peek inside of my life, my thought process, and that I can hear from you too because I really want this to be a two sided conversation.

So if you didn’t know actually, I recently created a Facebook community. It’s free and it’s for anyone who listens to the Pursuit with Purpose podcast, and wants to dive in deeper into the topics that we talk about, learn more about the other listeners, and just gain a bigger perspective on how we can become our best selves. So if you’re interested in joining that, go to pursuitwithpurpose.com/community. You can join that group. I would love to see you in there. I’m going to be doing some Facebook lives in there on a pretty frequent basis. I might do some Q&As with some of our guests, but it’s going to be a great place to have more conversations with other listeners and myself if that’s something they are interested in. So again pursuewithpurpose.com/community if you want to join that.

For this first solo episode, I thought it would be fun to just do a little check in on my life. I use to write a blog. A lot of people who listen to this podcast found me through a blog that I used to write or maybe even through my Instagram account. On my blog and on my Instagram account, I was able to be pretty personal and share things about my life and how my business was doing, and really peel back the curtain because transparency for me is something that’s so important. I noticed with the podcast, because I’m interviewing these incredible people who I absolutely love and it’s such an honor to interview them, I don’t really get the opportunity to share my life with you as much anymore. So I thought it’d be fun for this first episode to just do a little check in and let you know how things are going, what big changes I’m actually making in my business right now, and how I’ve personally been working through burnout. So let’s get started.

Right now when this episode will be released, I will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, which I’m so excited about. This is actually the third country I’ve traveled to this year. The other ones were Ecuador, Galapagos Islands and Guatemala. I absolutely love to travel. This is a fun vacation with my brother and my mom, so I’m really grateful to have some family time too. I’m going to Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam after Copenhagen, and I can’t wait. I’ll be in Europe for a couple weeks, and then after that, I’m going to come back to the US and do a sabbatical. So for me, this sabbatical was really necessary because I got to a point with my business where I felt like I had lost all of the creativity that I had when I started it. This is my fifth year of running my business full time. I started it really as a creative person and an experimenter. I got a lot of joy out of just trying things. Now I’ve noticed that as my business grows and there’s more eyeballs on the things that I do, I feel this sense of pressure. It’s really zapped a lot of the creativity that I have for my work. I’ve noticed that a lot of things feel very routine and just very draining. This podcast has actually been one of my favorite things to do during this period of time, because it’s one of those things that really brings me back to myself and reminds me of why I’m doing my business and why I care so much about my community, and that it can be fun and creative.

So with this sabbatical, I’m going to be doing it for about four weeks. My goal is to work as little as possible. I don’t mean to not work at all, but really to just not look at my to-do list, not check in with my team, and instead just gravitate towards wherever I need to go and start thinking of creative, fun ideas without the pressure of needing them to be perfect or more polished. I was talking to a friend earlier today about how I really want to get back to this sense of raw creativity, because it’s so easy as you grow your business to find some notion of success and then start to put all of this pressure on yourself, where everything has to be polished and everything has to be perfect. If it’s not, then you’re failing. That has been my experience. Maybe it’s not yours, but it’s been my experience. I’m excited to get back to that raw sense of creativity. During this sabbatical, I’m still going to be doing the podcast. I’m still going to be doing things that I find fun and creative like my Instagram, but I’m going to be using it as a time to dig deeper into myself and work out some ideas for things that are coming up in my business. So two things that I’m really excited about, which will be a big focus for me during this sabbatical, are writing a book—so I’m not writing it just yet, but I’m going to be working on a book proposal. I’m going to start working on that proposal and then pitching it to publishers probably in the fall. The book won’t come out until late 2019 or even early 2020, because books take forever to get published, but that’s okay.

And then in January or February of 2019, I’m so excited to tell you this, but we’re going to be doing a live event. So we’re looking to have a couple hundred people there and it’s going to be most likely in Los Angeles. We’re just finalizing the venue right now actually. The event is going to be really a new beginning for my community in a way, because it’s not just going to be a marketing event where you learn how to grow your business and make more money online an all that kind of stuff, which I feel like I’ve done a lot of and taught a lot of over the past few years. That’s how a lot of people know me. They know me through Pinterest or webinars or blogging or growing your online business. I love that. I have found so much joy in helping people gain freedom basically, through their career and through their work. That freedom for myself has been absolutely unbelievable, but what I’ve also found is that a lot of people, maybe you, don’t need another business strategy, instead we think we need more business strategies. So we read more books, we listen to more business podcasts, we read more emails and blog posts, we go to conferences, we hire business coaches. And then we implement everything and we’re like what the heck, why is nothing working or why do I feel so overwhelmed right now or why do I keep getting in my own way. What I’ve found is that a lot of people don’t need more business strategy, what they need instead, is a mindset shift.

So this event that I am working on that’s going to launch in January or February 2019 is going to really help entrepreneurs develop the mindset that they need to create massively successful businesses and lives. Yeah, there will be some marketing stuff there too and you’ll learn some tactical strategies, because I think that’s important also, but I really want to help people grow beyond just making six figures or growing their business. Things like that are important, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate money too and I want to help you grow your business, but I also want to help you just have a freaking rock star life and really enjoy the things that you’re doing, because it’s so easy to grow a business and realize that you get to a place that’s not fulfilling. I had that experience a couple of years ago with my own business. I had hit seven figures and I was miserable. It might sound silly, why would I be miserable if I’m making so much money? But I think we both can logically understand that money doesn’t bring happiness. It’s an amazing tool to have in your life, but if money is the thing that you’re going for because you think it’s going to solve all your problems, then you might be in for a rude awakening.

This event and really just what I’m going to be doing with my business in general moving forward, is combining that marketing strategy, that business tactic, whatever, with the mindset component, the personal development, the getting into alignment with who you truly are, the self-love component. I’m so excited to bring more of this to what I do. I’m actually working right now and getting an ontological coaching certification. And yes, ontology and oncology are two different things. Ontological coaching with a T, is a form of coaching where you coach somebody’s way of being. What that means is that you’re really going to the foundation of who they are, the core of who they are, how they’re showing up in their life, and then coaching them to help them get different results in every other area of their life. So I don’t necessarily want to be an ontological coach or a life coach, but I want to learn some tactics and strategies beyond what I already know, that I think would be really helpful for my students and future clients too. That is something that I’m doing right now as well, and really just diving more into personal development workshops and books, and more of an understanding of my own identity. Something that I love to do that helps me uncover more of who I am deep down, is journaling. So journaling is one of those things where I feel like I learned so much about myself if I do it consistently. Now it doesn’t really work if you journal every month or even every week, but if you do it every day for just a few minutes, you start to see your patterns. For me, I started to see that I was writing about the same fears over and over again or the same moments would pop up, and the same patterns were things that I was creating in my life. So for me, journaling is just this great way to have more self-awareness about what I can work on and how it can help me grow too.

I’m changing some things in my business. I’m going on a sabbatical, but I’m also seeking out more new experiences, because in the stage of wanting to be more creative, I found that I really want to start doing things that kind of push my comfort zone or things that I’ve never done before. So I recently did a beekeeping class which was freaking awesome. I’m actually going to do an episode all about honey bees at some point because they are the most interesting creatures ever. I did that. I want to go horseback riding soon. That’s been something that I’ve been feeling really called to do, as well as skydiving. I’m also signing up for some hip hop dance classes because I want to shake my booty and learn how to dance not like a white girl. An area that I’m working on personally growing in is, cultivating more female friendships. I feel like I grew up with a lot of female friendships, a lot of great women in my life, but since around college, I’ve felt like it’s just easier for me to make friendships with men. I have a lot of great male friendships and I connect well with men as friends, but I look around and there’s not many women that I actually talk to on a consistent basis or that I think I’m really close to. There’s definitely people that I talk to in masterminds and that I’m friends with, but I know that this is an area that I’ve been hiding from. I have had experiences before with female friendships where I was hurt very badly, and I think I held on to that without even realizing it. This is something that I’m more coming into the knowing of more recently. I want to change that because I see that for what it is, I see that as a fear from my past. I’m working now on just really putting myself out there more, seeking out more female friendships, and seeing them as this beautiful sisterhood that could unfold, rather than this scary thing that could hurt me. So that’s something that I’m working on for myself right now too.

Those are some of the bigger things that are happening in my life right now. Before I go, I want to make sure that this is valuable for you. So I want to check in with each other because we’re already halfway through 2018 right now. First of all, whoa, I feel like the year flew by, but I also feel like I say that every single year which is a little bit scary. We’re halfway through the year and I want to check in because I think it’s so easy to get sidetracked and forget halfway through the year where you said you wanted to go, what direction you wanted to head in at the beginning of the year, because it does fly by. If we take one wrong turn or one turn away from where we said we wanted to go, then it’s really easy to just go down this completely different path, and get to the end of the year and realize that we ended up somewhere we totally didn’t mean to be.

So let’s take a moment together and think about where we are right now and if it’s in alignment with the direction that you wanted to head in at the beginning of the year. Have you pursued the dreams that were important to you in January? Have you fallen off track anywhere in your life? Is there some kind of fear holding you back from what you said you wanted to do? Take a moment and think about that. What is that you wanted to create when you started this year? Are you moving in the direction that’s going to help you create that? Have you already done it? Do you have the support system in place to help you move further faster or are you in a completely different place right now? And if so, how does that feel? Does it feel good, like something that you stumbled upon and didn’t even realize was the thing you wanted to do this year, or does it feel like oh crap, I’m totally not where I meant to be? If you are in a place that’s not in alignment with what you wanted to create this year, then ask yourself why. How did you create that? Did you not do something that you needed to do? Did you say yes to too many opportunities that stunted your growth? Were you afraid to put yourself out there and be seen? Was there something holding you back? And if so, how can you work through that thing?

So check in. What I’d really love to do is hear your response. Head over to the Pursuit with Purpose Facebook community at pursuitwithpurpose.com/community, because in that group, I want you to create a post and let me know where you’re at with what you said you wanted to create this year. Are you in alignment? Are you living a purpose driven life and creating a purpose driven business or have you fallen a little off track, which happens to all of us at times, and you need some support to help you stay on track? It’s the perfect place to find people to keep you accountable and to find a group who’s also interested in mindset and personal development and becoming our best selves. Head over to the community, pursuitwithpurpose.com/community, and let me know. I’m going to be checking your responses too.

Thank you for listening to my first solo episode. I know this one was a lot about me and my life, but I’m excited for future episodes to share some of the lessons that I’ve been learning in my life recently, and to continue learning together because I see this as a two way conversation. I want to get to know you and who you are deep down, and what you dream about, and what you care about. So excited to keep doing these episodes and I hope you got a little something, something out of this. I will see you next week for my next interview and solo episode number two. All right beautiful friends, chat soon.

Hey, don’t go yet! Listen up. Did you get something meaningful out of this episode? Well the most meaningful thing you can do right now is go and leave a review on iTunes, because those reviews are what keep us here. Make sure to subscribe and share this episode. Finally, are you pursuing your purpose? Show us on Instagram with the #pursuitwithpurpose. I’ll see you over there, and thanks so much for listening to the Pursuit with Purpose podcast at pursuitwithpurpose.com. Bye.