3 Things That Block Success In a Meditation & Coaching Business
In this solo episode, I explore three states of being that get in the way of what you want. I highly encourage you to listen to see if you're experiencing any of them and learn what to do instead. I'm rooting for you!
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond and if you're newer to this show, I come at these topics as someone who quit a corporate job in 2015 to pursue doing the work I love and learning how to make my life's work matter and also to make a meaningful impact and income from that work has been a beautiful journey. And it's those lessons that I hope to share with you that I've went through through this podcast, speaking through the years, speaking to my previous self, wishing I had a podcast like this available. And so this is my offer and offering to you friend. So thanks for listening and we'll get into what I want to share about today, which is three states of being that will hinder block, sabotage our success. And you might look at these as states of being. You might look at these as emotional reactions. They're somewhat similar, but. But I think understanding it as a general state of being I find helps to make a shift because sometimes it's not as simple as there's an emotion that's coming and going, but it's more of this general attitude that we have that we might not even realize we have and that brings us to our first state of being that's gonna hinder our success and that is resentment. Now if you're just starting out, you might not have any resentment yet. And if that's you, congrats. Great, great. Listening to this earlier on, if you are on the journey a little bit, you might have already come up against resentment. Resentment can often happen when we are giving so much, trying so hard, doing all the things and then when we go to ask for a sal or we try to get someone to buy or offer them to buy, we hear crickets or things just simply don't work out. Maybe we see other people that seem to have some success through some sort of marketing effort or on some platform and we don't have it. So we start to resent either our entire work, we start to resent that platform, we start to resent maybe the people that aren't buying from us. And this is not a good state to be in. I'll give a personal example. For years I had been building and sharing and giving to my newsletter, my email list and never really had much of anything to sell. There was rarely an email where I had an offer where in exchange someone would pay for money. I was literally spending years just giving, giving, sharing either insights that are coming on a week to week basis, sharing meditations that I created and giving them out for free. And that is what I did with for years on my newsletter. And then in 2021, Insight Timer started this thing called workshops where you create a workshop, you offer it at a specific price, and then you offer it to the people in your community. And I thought, wow, this workshop. And by the way, not to toot my own horn, but I had the first workshop ever in Insight Timer history in June of 2021. This is not to say I'm better than anyone, it's just how the timing worked out, alas. So in 2021 I'm like, wow, I have this workshop for. It was a three week workshop for living your core values or finding and living your core values. And I was so excited because all these people, these thousands of tens of thousands of people that love my work on Insight Timer, now they have an opportunity to go deeper with me. Now they have an opportunity to support me and give me money because I've been giving this offer free for years now they can actually spend their hard earned dollars and support me. Wow, amazing. I can't, I couldn't wait. I was so excited to get this offer out. I saw this workshop having hundreds of people in it. I saw this being this like huge, huge thing. And maybe you can relate to having high hopes and then getting them shattered. And that's what happened is I thought that everyone would want to sign up and pay for this workshop. And in reality that's just not how these things work. And by the way, I actually had a pretty decent outcome for that workshop. I think I had maybe like 10 or 12 people signed up, which is great. But in my wacky head, I thought that this was a massive failure. And I kept sending emails promoting it, getting crickets. And so it was at this time where I started noticing this resentment, like, why am I doing all this stuff for free? And yet when I have something to sell, getting nothing back and this is not a good energy to be in, this is where we can start going down the road of seeing our subscriber list or followers not as people, not as human beings with a life and sovereignty and many other things going on, but as digits or numbers to hit to fill our ego or fill our sense of self worth or whatever it might be. We're looking for them as a means to an end rather than the core of what I know we got into this work for to serve, to give, to do the work that we love and make a difference. And this happened to me. I started resenting my email list so much so I lost the drive and the motivation to write new emails. Like, well, you know, if they don't give me anything back, why am I going to keep giving to them? And this is just, again, not a good energy to be. And I was mulling in that energy for a few months until I received this profound statement from a woman named Margo Aaron. She runs a blog called that Seems Important Dot Com. She's phenomenal. And she made this comment that really stuck with me. She said, your audience doesn't owe you anything. I'll say that again. Your audience doesn't owe you anything. And once that really hit, I realized, oh, I'm experiencing a lot of resentment towards my audience. Oh, that's getting in the way of sharing. Oh, that's getting in the way of everything. And what this helped me do and what I hope it helps you do, if you find yourself feeling this is to come back to your mission, come back to why you got into this in the first place. And if you're here again, that's likely because you have a heart that wants to serve and help people. And so once I was able to let go and be like, well, these people don't owe me anything. I'm here to serve them. This is my purpose, not theirs. And great, if some people purchase and go deeper, amazing. And if not, that doesn't matter because I'm here to serve them. End of sentence. And once I made that shift, right, just my whole days shifted. I just enjoy doing the work again. They say this phrase that I'm sure you heard, do what you love and the money will follow. Where I believe in this truth, by the way, but where this goes south is that people start doing what they love and expecting the money to follow. And it's in the expectation that things start to spiral downwards. We need to let go of the expectation. We need to trust the timing of our journey and focus on the craft, focus on doing what we love. So that's first resentment number two, desperation. I know there might be some coaches listening to this that have felt the feeling of, I need to make a sale. I have a discovery call coming up. It would be really helpful for my business if I made this sale. And you don't end up making the sale because that energy, even if it's subtle, of need, of desperation, is repulsive, that people do not want to feel that. And so it's important to notice, are we in a state of desperation? Because that's always going to repulse the thing that we want. Sales Trainer Myron golden says selling is hard because people care if they buy. Selling is hard because you care if they buy. And this is the essence of how desperation can get in our ways. And it's so hard. This one's a tough one. And desperation can be a strong word, but it could also be just very subtle. If your well being is going to be determined on whether someone says yes or no that you have given away your power. Simone Soul has a great podcast episode on this around hosting coaching discovery calls. I think her podcast is done right now, but it's called you'd Korean mom. So if this interests you deeper on the Discovery call piece, please go check that out. But she says if your well being hinders on, if they say yes or no, you've given away your power, they can feel that. And that's not a safe place, that's not a clean energy to be in. And so we got to check our energy before engaging, before being on calls, before selling anything. And this is helpful. I mean I'm someone who quit a job and was desperate at many times and so I've kind of gone up and down through this journey and you know, I've also found things have come when I've needed them. For some you might have that similar experience and for others listening to this, this is the benefit if you are at a 9 to 5 already, if you have a day job and this is still your side hustle, this is probably the number one benefit is that you don't need to feel desperation because it's not actually hindering on your financial well being. You don't have to feed the kids and pay the rent if this person says yes or no, yada yada yada. And so that is one beneficial. So if you're still in that space, really work to be in this energy of accepting whatever is said, accepting what's happening because you don't physically, you might mentally think, wow, I've been doing this for a while and there might be a mental desperation that things are just not working out, but you don't on a bare bones financial level don't need to make it happen. So this is not this. I'm not saying I'm gearing you in that direction that it's necessary, but it is a benefit if that is where you're at right now. A note on thinking about your offers and selling and sharing, whether you're promoting online, whether you're offering your coaching in a discovery call, whatever it might look like. This is another one that I learned from Myron is that there's a video of Jacob the Jeweler. For those that don't know who Jacob is, if you've listened to 2000s rap music, you might have heard the name. Because there was a lot of rappers in that era that would talk about Jacob the Jeweler because that's where they got their jewelry. Anyway, there's a video on YouTube of Jacob the Jeweler attempting to give out actual solid gold coins to people on the street, literally handing out gold. And people are saying no. This is such a beautiful example of how we can share our offerings. If you think in the. If you believe in the value of what you're giving and. And someone says no, in the Jacob the Jeweler case, it was actually more valuable for him to keep that gold. He's giving away gold. He knows it's valuable. That if people say no, it's like, okay, well, yeah, this is gold. Like, someone's gonna want this. It's gold, right? You believe in it because it's a physical fact in that way. Like, gold has value. You have to believe in your offers. In the same way that this thing is amazing. If someone says no, this thing is amazing, there's going to be many more people who want this. And maybe it's even more valuable for me to keep it and find the right person to give it to. So I find that just a helpful way to think of really coming back to believing in the thing that you're offering. And if you're not believing in it, that's where some of the work is in strategizing and figuring out how do you fully believe in it. Okay, last one I want to talk about today is jealousy. This one is so big for me. And I'm sure if you get caught in a weird day and you're down the Instagram rabbit holes and you see people crushing it, maybe you experience this too. You know, for some of you obviously know me on Insight Timer and Early Days of Insight Timer, Early Days of Insight Timer courses, it used to be on the homepage if you launch the new course often, not always, some courses got put on the homepage, and if they got put in the homepage, the enrollment in that course skyrocketed way more than if they were in the next tab where you would find new courses. And so I remember having a new course come out and there was another person who had their course on the homepage for like 30 days straight. It was insane. And my course never got to the homepage and I felt all this jealousy towards this person and it was not a good feeling. It was really not a good feeling. And it was an experience of scarcity, right? Whenever we're in jealousy, jealousy, just to define it, is to feel that when someone else gains, it is our loss. When someone else is gaining, we're losing. Right? This is the essence of competition and this energy is of scarcity. And it's funny because that example, I didn't know the person at the time, but now I'm close friends with Charles Freili and I would do the same thing with his courses. I would go compare and I would see more people were joining his course before mine and I would feel jealous and all the things. And I've said this to him before and I've talked about this, I've done a lot of work on jealousy. And so it's important to check out where are you feeling that if someone else is gaining, you're losing? Because this is the opposite of abundance. This is not the state we want to be in. This state is going to create more scarcity. It's just not an enjoyable state to be in. And so my recommendation for working with this is any person that you feel jealousy towards, think of them in your medit, meditate with them. It's a practice Buddhist practice called Mudita, where you think of them and you celebrate and wish them further success. In the translation of Mudita is sympathetic joy or empathetic joy, where you feel that person's success as if it was your own. This is such a transformative practice. Try this out for a few days with the person that you're jealous of. It might be really hard to feel it at first, but I promise you, you do that over a few days, you see that person come your feed or in your life in some way again and you'll notice. Wow, what a radical shift. It's so beautiful because I really believe there is more than enough to go around right that, that there is a provision. If we can align ourselves and we can celebrate and realize that we are one. If we are one, when someone else wins, we win too. If we can embody this non dual truth, then things will start to open up in our life, in our business, in the success that we are maybe repulsing without knowing. So a quick recap. Three states of being that are going to hinder your success and just a quick note on what to do about them. Number one is resentment. Put a sign in your office, your audience doesn't owe you anything. Come back to your why? Because if you're really aligned with what you're doing, you know you would do it for free. To desperation. It's going to repulse people every time. Imagine you're giving away gold. Feel the value. Believe in the value of what you have to give and a no won't feel like it does now. Jealousy Notice where you think other success is your loss where you're in competition. Imagine that person. Meditate with that person in mind. Share in their success. Wish them more. Watch it. Transform yourself. Thank you so much for listening. Which one of these do you feel like you experience most of? I'd love to hear from you. Send me a message. You can actually do a voice recording message right through the speaker pipe app. It's right in the link below. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so so much and I'll see you next week. And before you take off, if you like this episode or like this podcast, please consider taking a moment to leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow. And if you are someone wanting to use meditation to share your gifts, I have a free course called Meditation Script Mastery. You can click the link in the podcast description and get you set up with learning how to create unique meditations that you can share with your students, your clients and you can share with your friends. So thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time.