Transcript

Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Here we are for episode 126. Ani, how are you?

Ani
Pretty good. How are you doing?

Brian
I am ready to talk about this topic today.

Ani
What are we talking about, Brian?

Brian
Oh, my God. What we are talking about, it’s one of your favorite topics.

Ani
Is it? Yeah. Money. It’s not money. For me, really, that’s my favorite thing. It’s all of the empowering conversations that we can have about money. I’m not a money person necessarily. Okay, maybe I am. All right, let’s talk about money. Okay, yeah.

Brian
Well, I was going to say, it’s like you love having all the empowering conversations of money because it reaches into so many parts of our lives in so many ways. It does. So today we’re talking about the top mindset blocks stopping coaches and consultants from bringing in more cash. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. All right. We work a lot with small business owners in the health and wellness spaces, professional coaching, consulting, training. Training. L&d. Yeah, L&D. They’re looking to grow their business. They want to bring in more money, and they want to bring in more money. And they may feel stuck at a plateau. They may feel like they’re struggling. They’re all at different levels. But let’s face it, if you’re in business, part of business is being able to drive revenue into your company so that you can grow your company and provide a better service.

Ani
Even if you’re a solopreneur. And we, over our years, helping people with these issues. We have helped people to start new practices, their own solopreneur private practices, all the way up to multimillion dollar business owners. So we have a lot of experience in many different price ranges or income, revenue levels, for sure. I feel really fortunate to have been behind the eyes of hundreds, if not more than hundreds of business owners, way more than hundreds, thousands of business owners over the years to see trends and patterns and really be able to help people, especially with this It’s a different level of revenue thing because there’s definitely something to operating at different revenue levels. Then there’s also these things that underlie whatever revenue level.

Brian
Money does just reach into all parts of our lives. We could be naive and say, Oh, money is not important. We don’t want to make it about money. We don’t want to make our business about money. We don’t want to make our lives about money. But the fact is that if you live in a Western, industrialized, commerce-driven society, then money is a primary feature of living.

Ani
And money is not the number one motivating force for most of the clients who are working with coaches at this Meta Coaching Academy. But that doesn’t mean that money is not important, like you said, because money matters for a lot of different reasons. Yeah. So one of the reasons that money is important for me is the idea of freedom. For somebody else, it’s providing. For somebody else, it’s creativity. There’s all kinds of things that money can help support our evolution in. And it does touch every area of our lives, whether we like it or not.

Brian
Whether we like it or not. There’s a little saying that we need basically three things when we live. We live in this world we live in. Number one is air. We need air to breathe. Number two is a water, and number three is money. But I’m actually going to change that. I think number two is money.

Ani
Well, we buy filtered water here.

Brian
Most people are paying for water.

Ani
Yeah, even if it’s town or whatever.

Brian
You might be paying taxes, water taxes.

Ani
It’s like air and money.

Brian
Maybe someday we’ll have to pay for air. Who knows? But at this moment in time, It’s like we need air, and then we need money to pay for all the other things that we use in our lives. That’s why it’s a major feature of stuff. You may be an entrepreneur, which means you’re an employee. And so if you’re an employee, you go to your job and you punch a clock, and then you get paid, you get money from doing your job, and then you use that money to pay for all the things in your life. If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, coaching consulting practices, all those kinds of things, you have to find a way to bring revenue into your own company because an employer is not paying you. You are the employer potentially for other bench members or your own employees. But you always have to be out there looking for ways to bring revenue through your company so that you can not only perform the services of your company, but you can also live the life that that you really want to live.

Ani
Whether or not you have a team.

Brian
Yeah, whether or not you have a team. What are the blocks then? Because a lot of people want to bring in more money, and they have plateaued, they feel stagnant, and so There’s a block or there’s a misalignment with understanding how money works or with them and their money, or potentially even, really what it boils down to a lot is really valuing the self. We might call it self-worth, but it’s really about valuing either ourselves and/or valuing the services that we provide. Oftentimes when we are small business owners, coaches, consultants, the business we provide is a direct projection of our self. It can get really wound in funny that way.

Ani
I was just talking with… Who was I talking about this with? Someone Some group for us. Oh, our Level 3 certification students yesterday. We were talking about how in order to move money, you need to have… I’m going to say a word, and then I’m going to erase it and say a new word. So in order to move money, you need confidence. Now, actually, what you need is certainty. But I use the word confidence first because it’s a word that people are more likely expecting me to say, and then you can try that on. So confidence makes sense to I need confidence to be able to go to networking events, have conversations, put myself out there, even to do the services that I do. I need confidence. Now, the reason that I’m moving the word confidence into certainty is there is a different flavor of it. And certainty is this interesting idea where I just know, which actually is a lot of embodiment. I just know. When you embody something, you just know. You don’t even have to think about it. It just is that. The reason I bring it up, Brian, is because you were talking about having self-worth in oneself or self-worth in services that you’re providing.

Ani
We had this exact same conversation yesterday, and I was relating to the students that a lot of times out there we hear people say, Own your worth. And it’s been my experience that people have a really hard time doing that. And one of the reasons I think that that is is because everybody, the natural laws would say, is inherently worthy. And so what the hell does that mean, to own your worth? I just never get into that conversation, actually. But what I do think that people need to lean into, whether it’s our students or folks who are listening, is what are you certain about? And sometimes it is actually certain that you can do it. You can provide the service, you can provide value. But also sometimes, like Brian was saying, it’s that certainty that the tools and the systems that you use really work, the work that you do, the processes that you do really work. And so that’s using, like Brian was saying, using self-worth in the direction of the services that you provide. You have to be able to find something where you can really lean in on self-worth and your certainty of worth to be able to have the conversation about moving more money into your business because that’s It’s how money moves, is the exchange of value.

Brian
Yeah, that’s really what it is. It’s not only what we value as the provider of the service, it’s really the value of the consumer of the service. It’s what value is the consumer of the service placing on the service, and that will determine. Whether you agree with it or not, if you just look at where money goes and flows all around you in whatever country that you’re living in, that would pretty much tell you what people value in the country. Now, you might not agree with that or not, but that’s beside the point. The point is, if you just look at as an objective exercise, that where money goes, that’s a signature of what people value.

Ani
We live in the US, and if you look around, one of the things that money really flows to is entertainment.

Brian
Entertainment, yeah.

Ani
That’s a big one. People value entertainment. We know that because people pay for it.

Brian
Yeah, and it’s sports entertainment. It’s professional sports. It’s movies. It’s streaming.

Ani
It’s- Yots and boats and leisure entertainment. There’s a lot of money in there.

Brian
A lot of money flowing in those industries. So you just got an understanding.

Ani
It’s YouTube and social media. And there’s so much that’s about entertainment and those things, too.

Brian
Yeah. So that’s just get an idea of money is going to flow to where value is perceived by the consumer, right? Where value is perceived as a consumer. And so if we dial us back just a second and start talking about the blocks, some of the blocks that can happen internally. One of the blocks that’s coming right now is if we don’t agree with how the consumer is valuing the service and we’re blocked around our own perception of what’s more valuable. You might think that the service you provide is more valuable than the place that people right now are spending a lot of money. We might believe here at Somatic Coaching Academy that the service of providing a personal transformation is more valuable than going to a football game. That might be our belief. However, if the broad consumer base is spending money going to the football game, not on their own personal transformation, then we have to let go of our attachment to our belief about it. The block would be if you are attached to what you provide is more valuable than what society deems is valuable, then you can’t actually shift and change what you’re doing if you have an attachment to that.

Ani
Are you saying we’re going into the football industry?

Brian
We’re going into the football industry, Ani. Yes. It’s going to be for me. Exactly. Going to the entertainment industry.

Ani
Oh, boy.

Brian
But does that block make sense? Like the attachment, the attachment itself to our baby of what we provide can be a block.

Ani
Well, I understand when you say it like that, but I think people listening might hear what you said before and say, wait a minute. Personal transformation, for example, is really valuable. And what are you saying? Should I go into the football business? Do you see what I mean? What do you mean I have to release attachment to it because I’ve got to sell the thing that I do. So what are you saying there? Yeah.

Brian
So it’s not that you have to change what you’re selling. You have to release your attachment to it. Because if you get upset, it’s all I’m saying is if you get upset when people spend money on the thing that you don’t value as much, that tells you you’re attached to it. And just the fact that you’re attached to it actually is a block that will make it very difficult for you to, let’s say, market or put out in the world what you do value. Just that block, just that attachment that creates a level of emotional discordance in you will affect your ability actually to provide what you want in the world in a way where people will see it as being valuable.

Ani
It will prevent you from using your creative resources to find a way to meet people where they’re at.

Brian
Okay, there you That’s a hidden, really insidious, shadowy way that one of those, that attachment block can work.

Ani
I think maybe another way to talk about this is a lot of providers think that they need to really be able to articulate what they do so people understand. They’re really attached to needing articulate what they do so people understand. I’m not saying that’s not important, but what’s more important is that the person you’re talking to, the people you’re talking to, feel understood. Correct. Yeah. Letting go to your point, of our attachments around that allow us to, to my point, have more creative conversation about, hang on a second, how can I help meet the market in a way that they feel understood, which is a different way to approach Yeah, because going to the football game, let’s just use an example, or entertainment.

Brian
Consuming the entertainment is fulfilling a need of the consumer. When you can get curious about what that need that’s being fulfilled, and then you can have the conversation about that to understand how they’re thinking about it, it very well could be the service you provide, the deep personal transformation, It actually also fills that need for that person. If you’re attached to actually what they’re buying and you don’t understand the need is fulfilling, that’s where… I think you’re clarifying for us, that’s really where the sticky part I don’t know where that is.

Ani
Yeah. One of the conversations that we have here at the Smata Coaching Academy all the time is recognizing that the people that you’re serving know they have problems with something, and they’re looking for solutions. And one of the things that’s real money block is seeing that other people have problems and trying to convince them that they have problems.

Brian
Correct.

Ani
So what you’re saying is when we start to really acknowledge the needs that people are getting fulfilled, then we have a better awareness about how they’re thinking about their problems and how they’re going about solving those problems. And then we can have a conversation with people. But we’re not going to have a conversation with people when we’re trying to convince them they have problems.

Brian
Exactly. Or trying to convince them that what they’re consuming is wrong or bad. Right. Because what they’re already consuming is fulfilling a need. You have to understand what that need is. Then if you can also fulfill that need, then you’ve got a connection, an authentic connection with someone that’s going to help you drive more revenue through your business, which is really important. Another block that we see in certain levels in terms of person’s development, let’s just look at this for a second. Really success, in my experience, of all the entrepreneurs small business owners that we’ve worked with over time. Really successful small business owners know that they need to continually invest in themselves. Yes.

Ani
Do they know what they do?

Brian
They do it every year. They’re like, What am I investing in myself this year?

Ani
That is things like coaching services and strategy services and things like that. But it’s also things like memberships and team payments and software and all kinds of things that you invest in.

Brian
There’s never an end to the investing in self. Travel and conferences. This is a block that you see at a certain level of a certain income level of solopreneurs, small business owners, is that they have some type of belief that they don’t need to invest in themselves, even for a year. This year, I’m not going to invest in myself. And what happens is they end up falling behind the curve.

Ani
People are going to want to know what What is that income level? And I think for me, the level is somewhere around $60,000 a year-ish, where if people in general are making about $60,000 a year, they don’t have an understanding of repeated investment. And then I’m going to say over probably around $150,000 a year, people actually do have more of an understanding and an activity around making continual investment. I don’t know how you feel about that. That’s just a general guy.

Brian
I think that’s just about right. I would say the same thing.

Ani
From what I’ve noticed.

Brian
At those different income levels, though, I think it’s important to know what exactly is the best thing to be investing in at those levels?

Ani
Yeah, because one of the things that happens for folks- Is they invest in the wrong things. Maybe I’ll put another number around it. But for right now, I’m just going to say there is this, Yeah. There is this level at which I’ve noticed that people continue to invest in the idea in some incarnation that they don’t know enough. And then there’s a transition point from a revenue standpoint where people invest knowing they know enough and they want to know more. But there’s this thing where people are trying to fulfill, you’re talking about needs, trying to fulfill a need or avoid in themselves that they don’t know enough. But then there’s this transition where people still invest in learning opportunities, and maybe it’s the same opportunities, but they also know they know enough, and they’re moving forward with other investments. I don’t know. That’s one of the things that comes up.

Brian
In general, the understanding from really successful business owners is you got to keep investing in yourself. You just have to. Because of the law of more life, let’s just talk about the natural law of more life, which states that everything in nature and also the universe is always in a constant state of growth and evolution. Things just keep growing and growing and growing. And as business owners, if we opt to not invest in ourselves, then it’s like we’re opting not to grow not to grow anymore. And opting not to grow anymore doesn’t mean that you stay stagnant. What it means is actually you fall behind because everything else is growing.

Ani
It doesn’t put you in relationship with the natural laws that places you out of the relationship with the natural laws. Yeah.

Brian
So whenever you find yourself or hear yourself saying, Listen, I’m done growing. I’m happy where I am, that may feel good for a day, a week, a month. But eventually, what’s going to happen is there’s going to be stress and pressure because other things are still growing and changing. And what happens, you start getting left behind. Yeah.

Ani
And you basically chose not to pay attention to those things. Yeah.

Brian
And then you’ll start to lose opportunities to continue to grow because you’ve claimed or said that you’re just good where you are thing. So business owners must continue to invest in themselves.

Ani
It’s part of being a business owner. I just want to expound upon this just a little bit more, again, that the investing in yourself doesn’t necessarily mean just buying coaching programs, because I think a lot of times when people talk about it out there, that’s what people say is, You got to keep investing in yourself, which means, Come buy my coaching program. That’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is basically spending money on things in your business and growing your capacity in all ways. Brian and I have this saying that the road to success is paved with paperwork. And what we mean by that is if you want to evolve your business, there is always going to be some eyeball rolling hassle that usually comes with some forms or figuring stuff out, whether it’s filling out forms to be a part of a membership organization or figuring out how to have a newsletter or a new piece of software that’s going to help move you forward, or figuring out how to coordinate travel, or figuring out how to coordinate getting to conferences, or figuring out how to speak and what goes into that And applications after applications after applications, hence the paperwork thing.

Ani
Just imagining the Wizard of Oz, but the yellow brick road is paved with paperwork. That’s growth. There’s always applications. There’s always software attached to it. There’s new apps you have to learn. There’s new technology and all that stuff. That’s just a part of being a business owner.

Brian
Yeah, agreed.

Ani
And that’s investing in yourself. All of those things are investing in your business. Yeah.

Brian
The other thing, the other place is when you think about investing, I think the two ways you think about this or two things that people are primarily investing in when it comes to business growth is business strategy. Strategy and also mindset. A block that we see with people is when they believe that they can grow to the place they want to grow to by only investing in strategy. And business strategy is critical to invest in. Let’s just say that. I think business strategy is the most critical to invest in up to, I would say, probably right around that $150,000 mark. You have to have a strategy for how- You have to know something about other people.

Ani
You have to know something about how you’re Have gotten to do something. Exactly. Yeah. If you don’t know anything… Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, by the way. I remember supporting people who wanted to do retreats for the first time or have a wellness center. And we’ve done those things so we could help with strategy. It’s not that every single thing we said was gospel, but it put people on a page where you, Oh, I didn’t know that that went into it. And it helps to have people who are mentoring you, who have been there and done that. Yeah. And then there comes this point where the strategy, to your point about a revenue point, where the strategy is important to have heard, but in order to continue to evolve and expand your revenue into greater and greater impact, you really need to be doing the mindset work to understand that Every strategy actually works. Every strategy actually works, but none of them work on a faulty mindset.

Brian
Right. Yeah. So the little phrase is that a mediocre strategy with great mindset is far more effective than the perfect strategy with poor mindset.

Ani
Absolutely.

Brian
There’s a couple of indicators to tell you, Oh, wow, do I really need to be investing in mindset? Is that really where I need to be putting? Well, one indicator is if you’ve tried three different strategies to get where you want to go, and none of them have worked, that’s probably a mindset issue.

Ani
I would say that’s generous, Brian, to be honest. Are you generous? I think so, because to be perfectly honest, every strategy works.

Brian
If you’ve been using a strategy and it’s just not… Well, the reason I say that, Annie, is because a lot of people don’t stick with a strategy very long if it’s not working. Yeah, I know. They’d say, Oh, it’s the strategy. I got to change it to the another strategy. Oh, that’s not working. I got to try the other strategy. That’s why I say three, because people, one is like, Oh, well, they could convince themselves it’s a strategy. Two, they could say, Well, they could also convince themselves it’s a strategy. But once it’s three times, then you have to ask yourself, What’s the common factor with all these strategies? Oh, it’s me. Then it’s like, Oh, I’ve got to work on my own mindset.

Ani
To your point about the three strategies, we’ve seen people do a podcasting strategy that doesn’t work, and then they’re going to do a stage strategy that doesn’t work, and then they’re going to do a networking strategy that doesn’t work. Here’s what they say, Podcasting doesn’t work, stages doesn’t work, networking doesn’t work. You could go on to a fourth or a fifth one before you say it’s about me. We’re saying, Hey, if you’re headlong into your first or second or, oh my gosh, your third one that isn’t working, all the strategies work. Look towards mindset. Yeah.

Brian
The other… Go ahead.

Ani
No, I was just going to say one of my favorite phrases is, Every strategy works, but nothing works on the quick stand of a faulty mindset. Exactly. Yeah. Just going to suck you in.

Brian
Yeah. Nothing works on the quick stand of a faulty mindset. Yeah, I love that. It’s great. I was just going to say the other flag, too, is if you’re stuck If your revenue stuck at right around the $100,000, $150,000, $150,000 mark, and you just can’t push back that past that, that’s a mindset issue. I agree. You really need to be able to switch. Because what will get you that far is often really hard work. Hard work. Hard work.

Ani
Congratulations. You’ll be able to work it.

Brian
And a decent strategy will get you into those low six figures. But then what happens is you can’t work any harder to get any further. And so you end up hitting that ceiling, and then you just get exhausted. And that hard work, while it can be a strength, it can also be a liability when you start getting to that level of revenue in your business.

Ani
And by the way, if you’ve been trying to get to six figures or $150,000 a year, something like that, you haven’t been able to get yourself to get into the work that is required to get yourself to those income levels, you probably still have some self-worth issues.

Brian
Exactly, which comes back to mindset again. You have to invest in strategy, and you have to ask yourself, seriously, do I really need to actually invest in mindset? Now, let’s just say for a second, too, what mindset would you invest in? What mindset support would you invest in? Because there’s There’s a lot of people out there who have mindset coach on their shingle, that they do mindset. But what you want to do is make sure a couple of things, that they understand to some degree what service it is that you’re providing. It’s even better if they have experience in that area, but it’s even better if they’ve helped people do what you want to be able to do. That’s even better. If they’ve actually helped other people get to the levels of income that you are wanting to get to, that’s probably one of the most important features of working with a mindset professional. Another feature is what’s their system? What’s their proven system of helping people to grow their, we could It’s not a mindset, but it really boils down also to their self-worth.

Ani
Just your point on system, because a lot of mindset people out there, their system is their intuition.

Brian
Check that out. Which is not a system. No. Intuition is not actually a proven system.

Ani
No. But also, to your first point, you’re going to have people out there who say they do mindset work who are actually strategists who say they do mindset work. I’ve invested in a few people like that who haven’t actually been able to really help me from a mindset issue because some people think mindset is telling people they can do it. That’s not what we consider mindset. We consider mindset more complex than that. But some people consider mindset basically being able to tell people, You can do it. You can do it. Kind of like cheerleading. Sure. For some people, that is mindset. Getting some more information about what they think mindset is really important.

Brian
If you’re wondering how we talk about it, go back and listen to a whole bunch of podcasts we’ve done on this, how for us, the blocks to taking action, the blocks to perceiving the world in a different way, the existence side of your body. You really have to be able to resource your your body, not just what’s going on between your ears, what’s going on actually in your soma, what’s happening below your neck. When you know how to resource those areas, it helps propel you forward to be able to get better results in your life. And actually start to grow what we might call your self-worth bubble. Everybody has a certain level of self-worth. We develop that level of self-worth through our early life conditioning, through what we learn about our lives through our parents and our societies and our schooling and history and the news and all those kinds of things. Then as we develop through our adult life, our life experiences also can either feed our level of self-worth or they can actually take away a little bit our level of self-worth. But everybody has a self-worth level, let’s say. Because of that, some people have a lower self-worth level, and some people have a medium, some people have a higher one.

Brian
That’s correlative to how much revenue and how much money that people have in their lives. There’s actually some research that shows that as being as important and predictable. A lot of the work that we do with people in our programs is to help them expand their self-worth bubble or expand their self-worth ceiling, or expand their self-worth limit, or set point, where we could talk about it a lot of different ways. But that’s the idea is to expand your self-worth set point. There’s some caveats on how to do that. Because, again, what’s the top mindset block? It’s really all boils down a lot of times to how you value yourself, how you value what it is that you bring into the world, just cycling back to what we started talking about when we kicked off this episode of the podcast. But how you expand that self-worth bubble is really, really important. There’s just a couple of things I want to know that are pitfalls around that. Because to your point, Ani, a lot of coaches will tell people to just charge your worth, which you noted just a little bit earlier.

Ani
Yeah, well, when people have a self-worth issue, which to some degree a lot of people do, then as soon as somebody says, Charge your worth, guess what it does? Activates your self-worth stuff. Or, and, or. Well, and. Some people will just push into that, which actually, a lot of times, is still coming from self-worth stuff. Correct. Then that’ll be mirrored back to you with the things that happen next. You’re not really taking action then from a place of self-worth. You’re actually taking action from a place of self-lack that you think is self-worth, but it’s masquerading. It’s actually self-lack.

Brian
What it looks like is this, charging your worth. Say you’re in a negotiation with somebody, or You’ve got your pricing for whatever product or program that you’re doing, and someone pushes back on that pricing, and potentially this negotiation could have longer legs to it. In other words, this negotiation or this exchange with a person could have potentially years of investment in one another, in your service, in return for financial investment.

Ani
Like lifetime value of a client.

Brian
Lifetime value of a client. Sometimes what can happen is if your lack side of yourself comes up, what happens is we force the short term gain. We become so rigid about the pricing or charging what we want to charge, that we actually, when we force it like that, we create a discordance or a difficult relationship with thewith the client side of that. They feel like they’ve been pushed too far. They feel like they’re not getting… In other words, it does not feel equitable for them.

Ani
Equitable exchange, right.

Brian
Because you’ve pushed so hard. That’s your lack self-worth side actually making that push to convince you that it’s going to improve your self-worth, you get a short-term win, but you get a long-term loss.

Ani
You know what I’m just realizing hearing you say that a lot of people are concerned about being pushy. Comes up all the time.

Brian
Yeah, all the time.

Ani
The thing is, You should be concerned about being pushy when you’re coming from lack, right? It never occurred to me like that. But you don’t have to be concerned about being pushy when you’re coming from a true place of self-worth, because actually, a true place of self-worth is actually not just self-worth, it’s other-worth, too. And so you’re really looking at this opportunity to share value and share growth and things like that. And so you’re going to come at it from a totally different place, and you don’t have to worry about being pushy. But you actually have to worry about being pushy if you’re coming from a place of self-lack.

Brian
I’ve done that. I’ve done that earlier in my career, have pushed for the short-term win because I was like, Oh, God. I’m proving to myself that I’m worth it. Then I lose the business later on the line. Then I feel terrible about myself. I didn’t link it back to because I was pushing in the beginning, but then it feeds back into, I’m not really worth or my service isn’t really worth what I thought it was.

Ani
Well, that’s very self-aware of you. But also, you could have gone through that process and not known that it had anything to do with you. You could have had no awareness around it, first of all, or you could think that it was the other person or the situation or whatever, the world. That’s one that I’ve seen come up recently, by the way, and the world is crazy right now. I’ve had people make meaning that they’re coming from a lack-based mindset, and they’re going to make meaning of it that the world is just the way it is right now, and that’s what’s not working.

Brian
What’s not working, yeah, exactly. How do we actually flip this around? Because that self-worth bubble, your current level of self-worth, that’s a program that’s in your physiology. That program wants to stay there. You might not want it consciously to be there, but subconsciously, subconscious wants it to stay. Subconscious love it. It wants to stay the same. It’s going to find ways to manipulate your behavior and to keep it there. One of those ways is to force you to go for a short-term win, long-term loss scenario. How do we switch this around? I know what I’m about to say could be interpreted as being… Well, I’m just going to say it, and then we’re going to flush out some of the interpretations, okay? Okay. Because the law of gender, one of the other natural laws, basically tells us that there There’s a flow, an equitable flow between giving and receiving. Giving and receiving. It’s always an equitable flow. When we want to bring more revenue through our business, that’s the receiving side of things. We’re receiving revenue, receiving money. And the outpouring part is the giving of our service. We have to give service, receive money.

Brian
Give service, receive money. So that’s got to be in balance. And so the self-worth, the lack, part of us would say, ask for more money. When the way to actually facilitate the receiving of more money is to grow your capacity to, I’m going to say, give more. I know we’re going to talk about that in just a second. But it’s really about growing your capacity to provide more of something. Value. More value. In some capacity. But also growing your capacity to energetically output things, too.

Ani
Yes, correct. Things, too. Not just give more, but energetically output. That was the law of gender, not the law of genitalia, just so you know. It’s an energetic, it’s an energy. Not a genitalia in a geo. That’s important to what I think we might talk about next, because as soon as we start to talk about people adding more value, I get on a soapbox about protecting my people around how women often view themselves. I’ve been in this camp as well, where we could say, I’m adding value all the time. I’m actually exhausted from adding value. Listen, ladies, if you’re listening and you’re like, Preach. Okay, I’ve been there, too. And let’s have a conversation here. Because the thing is, you need to look at, like Brian was saying, what you’re receiving and what you’re giving out. So you may be outputting value, but what are you receiving back? And some of the things that we output value on do not actually get monetary return in how our society has consciously or subconsciously determined value exchange. Some of the things that we add, some of the ways we add value in our lives come back as things like appreciation or love or things like that.

Ani
So I’ll go there with the example of the kind value output that people of both genders and genitalia put out in the home, right? And how that… It’s not like people are getting paid because they did the dishes. I mean, if people were getting paid for doing the dishes, they might do more dishes. You know what I mean? But it’s not just in the home. There are ways that we add value in other capacities that don’t have necessarily a monetary exchange. Think about the community organization that you volunteer in and stuff. So what do you get back from that? When we volunteer, one of the things we get back is impact. We get to see that we made an impact. And so where there is value exchange. There is a reciprocity of some capacity, but it might not be in money. And so if you want to make more money, you need to look at using your energetic resources and growing your capacity to add value in places where the energetic exchange back is actually money.

Brian
Yeah. You have to be able to clearly ask for money in exchange for what you’re providing. Because if you don’t clearly ask for that, then what you’re really doing is you’re receiving whatever it is that subconsciously you’ve been programmed to receive. It might be that appreciation, it might be that love, it might be whatever it is that you feel you’re lacking most subconsciously. You might not be consciously aware of it. You’re always being compensated in some way for everything that you’re giving out. It just might not be in the form of money in order to get In order to get it in the form of money, you have to clearly ask for it in that form.

Ani
Yeah, this was a big learning for me. I was programmed as a kid, and I’ve been making money in a career since the age of nine, by the way. That was my very first job as a professional performer performer, and then I went into a professional performing career, and I’ve been making money since the age of nine. So just to say that for some context. But I recognize that I was programmed pretty strongly to look for the reciprocity of appreciation. And so as an adult, when I wanted to increase my income and I felt very stuck, I recognize that I was… One of the things was I would get appreciation back, and I would feel like I did a good job, and then that was enough and that actually asking for money was asking for too much. But I also was really disgruntled about the places in my life where I was adding value, but I wasn’t getting appreciation. I would complain that I wasn’t getting appreciation, and then I would complain that I wanted to get paid. A big shift for me was looking at where I was adding value and what the reciprocity was and where I was getting, specifically for me, in my example, appreciation and exchange where I wanted to get money and shift that.

Ani
I started to actually look for receiving money as the exchange rather than appreciation. Then one of the things that I did was I started to shift where I wasn’t getting appreciation in other areas of my life, for example, cooking. I started to add money in that place so that I wasn’t adding all this value, that I wasn’t getting the equal exchange that I wanted. We had somebody start to cook for us many years ago. Super awesome. But I was able to do that because I started shifting value exchange that I had in my life. Anyway, just a personal reflection on that one. Because I know talking about this sometimes is like, What? But you can actually transmute this stuff. You need to have the support, obviously, to be able to do it, the people who know what they’re doing on your team, AK, invest in yourself, I guess. But you also need to have the self-worth and work on the self-worth and grow your capacity of self-worth to keep stepping into inquiries in yourself. Because having this level of self-insight and then being able to take action on it does require a certain level of self-worth to put that into action.

Ani
Yeah. Then, of course, we help you grow those things by doing body practices because you energetically build your resonance and capacity so that you can go do those actions in the world, not just force yourself or just not force yourself or make it dramatic.

Brian
Yeah, Exactly. It’s really about growing capacity. I think if we have to underline a primary theme of this episode, if you really want to… Well, the block is, let’s just come out of the block again. What’s one of the top mindset blocks is I don’t have to grow my capacity anymore. That would be the block. I don’t have to grow my capacity anymore as a business owner, and money, for some reason, should be flowing into me for whatever reason without me growing my capacity anymore. That’s a key block. If you want to bring more revenue, one of the most important things to do from a mindset, energetic perspective is to grow your capacity. And your capacity doesn’t exist between your ears. Your capacity is your energetic capacity that flows through your entire body, your entire being. When you can get a more capacity so that your body can hold more capacity, but also allow more energetic capacity to flow through you, that’s what gives you enough and more energy to be able to basically do the business activities, grow. And by the way, then it doesn’t feel hard either. It feels like a natural progression of who you are because you’re naturally growing the way that everything else grows.

Ani
It’s like the Wadage on a light bulb. There’s a different amount of output in a 30-watt bulb, and there is a 40-watt bulb, then there is a 60-watt bulb. If you need more light, you put in a higher the Wadage bulb, it’s increasing your capacity to hold the Wadage so that it can be a brighter light bulb.

Brian
It might not be the best analogy because it’s the same amount of energy going into the bulb. You’re changing the amount of resistance in the bulb, which gives you a different amount of light.

Ani
Well, that works, doesn’t it?

Brian
We’d have to flush that one out to make it work a little bit better.

Ani
It worked well for me.

Brian
Yeah. Okay. So it works well for you. That’s good. But anyway, just the way- Decrease the resistance. Come on. Decrease the resistance. But that actually makes a dimmer bulb, not a brighter bulb. The brighter bags have more resistance associated with it.

Ani
Listen, I thought that that was awesome. But if you’ve got a better, and I’m sure listeners are like, I’ve got the perfect metaphor. Well, let us know. Leave us a comment under the YouTube video. Send us an email, put it in some comment section or whatever, and let us know what metaphor you think would be a good metaphor for this conversation.

Brian
That’s right. And so let us know. Thanks for joining us. Grow yourself Earth bubble. And we’ll see you next week.

Ani
Bye-bye.