Entrepreneurship as a Spiritual Path (Big Update on The Podcast)
In this solo episode I share the ways that growing our business supports is a pathway for spiritual growth. I also give an important update on the future of the podcast. Love you friend!
GIFT FOR YOU
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Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Lou: Welcome to another solo episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond, and today we're going to talk about entrepreneurship as a spiritual path, and I'm also going to share a bit of an update on this podcast. And so, to begin, there is a great line in On Work by Kahlil Gibran, which is a poem that is within his book of poems called the Prophet, and it captures the essence of how I believe we should aim to labor with love and do our work. And it's a long poem, but this is just one portion of of it. Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. This line speaks volumes. First, in that whatever our work is, that it is an expression of our love and that it's not about what we do, rather how we do it. And if we are doing things without love, we are actually not doing the work that is ours to do. It is better to be a bank teller who brims with joy and care for each customer than to be a therapist that despises having to listen to the hurts of their patients. How we do, not what we do. That is the essence of purpose. That is the essence of doing work that is coming from a deeper place. It's never exactly the what. And so to bring this into this podcast, the art and business of meditation, I want you and me to make sure that we are doing work that is an expression of this love. And I have to be honest with you, dear podcast listener, sometimes I bake bread with indifference. In getting this podcast out, many of you might know Mark Manson wrote the bestseller the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and just overall has crushed it in his journey in various ways. And he ended up starting a podcast titled the same title of his book, where he was interviewing people. And I happened to catch. I wasn't a big listener of the podcast, but for whatever reason, I happened to catch an episode where he said the last episode of the podcast, and I listened to it. He talked about how he despised having to seek out new guests and make invitations and figure out schedules, and he also did not like doing the research for the guests that came on. And when he said this, it was like a smack in the face. He spoke my words for Me that, honestly, as I'm sharing this with you all, I am not a huge fan of reaching out to people to have as guests. It is time consuming to do it right. It takes care, it takes thought. And, you know, you only hear the guests that say yes. There's many guests that have not said yes or don't respond. So you take 30 minutes to really put heart and energy into an outreach, never knowing if it's coming back. And that's okay. It's just not working. Where my highest joy is, not only that, is I don't love preparing for an interview. I like having the interview. Getting on a call, jamming with someone is super fun, but I want to do it right, and I want to make sure that I'm thinking of you all as I am recording. And so what I do is I'll spend an hour the day before and I'll think of questions and I'll be completely transparent. Sometimes I'm like, I don't know what other questions to ask this person compared to that person. And it's just kind of gotten boring. And I spend so much time, and there's been times where I spent so much time on questions, and then the person just cancels on me last minute. And it's all frustrating to be with. It's just I don't look forward to having to prepare for questions. Something Mark said, too, in that podcast episode is that people don't follow Mark Manson because of his great interviews. And I don't know, I think I've had some good interviews on here, and I'm sure I'm okay at it. I do a decent job. I think it's fun. I get it. But do I want to be known as the great interviewer? Do I want to be known as a guy with a podcast? And when I think of the most successful podcasts out there, I actually see them and I'm like, you know what? I don't want to be that. I don't want to just be an interview show. And so I've been wrestling with this. It's been so fun. This has been two years of the podcast now, almost full two years of it being the Art and business of meditation podcast. And it has been a joy. But I have just noticed this feeling of, wait a second, is there a way that is more aligned with me sharing my gifts, me sharing sending a message out to the world? And what's ironic in this podcast episode is what I'm doing right now is with that love, it is fulfilling preparing and sharing this topic for you has been rewarding. And that tends to be the case when I am doing something solo, when I'm creating a guided meditation, when I'm creating a talk, when I'm going to do a talk, when I'm leading a group. It tends to be where I feel like more of the spark of me comes alive. I am a human design manifestor, so I'm here to really come and to speak something out and for that to reverberate, not necessarily to cajole and help get something out of someone else. It just doesn't feel like my gifts. And so I love doing these solo episodes. You've probably heard me before, where I say, what's your favorite part of the podcast, the solo episodes? Because then I get to talk. I don't have to listen to other people talk. No, but really. So my intention today is a few reasons, is I want you to remind yourself to think of what that means for you, to ask yourself, where have you veered off track to the core of your gifts? Where are you veering off track? And we're never really off track that it's all perfect. There's so much beauty that has come from this podcast, has come from the guests, has come from connections, like, so much. And I'll get to the future of this podcast in a second. So you might be like, lou, is it going away? What's happening? I don't know what's happening, but I'll get to that in a second. But I do want to note something here that I'm kind of being an example of is I have a podcast episode here where I talk about the rule of 100 to do something for a hundred times and then make the decision whether you stay, whether you go, whether you make a change. And I have, I think, 100, maybe 18 episodes of this podcast. So I have moved through the a hundred. If I'm going to give transparency on numbers, I think total downloads is around 13,500, which I think is, okay, I don't know. That's two years of work for 13,500 downloads. The episode average is around 80 to 100 listens an episode. So it's not very big. You, dear listener, are part of a niche group, and I love you for that. But it's not big. And I'm not saying that that's the essence of making changes on this podcast, but it's also something to take in, to take into account, to see our numbers and be like, okay, well, what does this mean for the future? So, again, Before I get into the future, I hope you like the transparency. But before I get into the future, let's talk about entrepreneurship as a spiritual path. Because this questioning has been part of this unfolding in my life in the past few months of a deeper questioning of, you know, I'm having income sources that are cutting in half, like inside timer. My coaching practice has started to slow down too. People signing up for the Mastermind has slowed down and I'm making half the money that I was making. And so that's challenging to navigate when you have responsibilities and, you know, things that are dependable. And for me, moving across the country and having more expenses. So there's been in this new experience of feeling the financial pressure that I haven't felt in, honestly, four or so years. And so it's reminded me of that time. And I do believe that when we have the pressure, when we have things happening that we may be on the surface or like this is not good, it actually forces us to make changes that need to be made. And so I'm really opening to what that is for me, hiring support, finding a new coach, finding people that can help me, because I really do feel there is a new level to unlock. So, you know, that is part of any spiritual growth is understanding that we're going to have downturns, that in order for something new to happen, something has to die and we need to actually face challenges in order to grow. And so just more on this topic because it really feels so true for me in the past 10 years, why, how spiritual practice or entrepreneurship is a spiritual path. And in essence, it's what we talked about in this poem. It's that we do it for its own sake, that its process of figuring this stuff out is rewarding beyond the outcome. So your business should be something that you're enjoying, that you're loving the process that is ultimately rewarding and fulfilling, even if it's not always succeeding. And yes, we do need it to succeed and make money at some point. And yes, there'll be things that you do that are boring and admin. And that's part of it too, that it does take work, but overall that you are enjoying the process. Another thing this is connected to for entrepreneurship as a spiritual path is it's really asking you to have faith. To have faith even when you don't see results. Can you have the faith the size of a mustard seed to see that actually that will move mountains? And so many people don't. So many people lose faith when it doesn't work? I spent four or five years of it not working. So if it's not working for two months, I remember what that was like. And so sometimes it's actually helpful for me to have gone through years of that faith to then know how to be with it. And so if you're again gonna do this for your life's work, if you're gonna do this for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years when things aren't going well, you got to keep the faith. Just as if in our spiritual growth, our connection with the divine, the beloved, our connection with God, that we sometimes often have to keep the faith, even when our practice is not showing fruits. Another way this is a spiritual practice is it's asking us to let go of the highs and the lows really again, to let go of the outcome. When we surrender into the process, we enjoy it, we see the beauty that it brings into our life, and we don't get attached to the wins and losses because we don't want to be the person who we get a client. We feel good, we don't. We feel bad, because then we are letting external circumstances determine our inner state. And so the same thing as life as in our work, that we are the ones who can come into each day with non attachment, with a lot of love, with a lot of care, but with non attachment. Another way that it forces us to look at ourselves in a spiritual sense is all of the emotional triggers that could come up when things aren't going well. Our jealousy, our envy, our potential to do something out of ethics or out of integrity, that when we are at the brink, when we are feeling desperate, how do we act then? Can we notice the energies that show up and work with them like we would in any spiritual practice? Another way entrepreneurship is a spiritual path is it's humbling as hell. And like any good spiritual path should be, it forces us to realize that we aren't as great as we think we are. And we need to seek out help. We need mentors, we need guides, we need people that can help us get out of our own way. And we need to let go of thinking we have to do it all ourselves. We let go of thinking that we are God's gift to earth. And humility is always such a sweet medicine, even when it's tough to swallow. And then the last thing I'll say about entrepreneurship as a spiritual path for now, is that our work, if it's truly devoted to something else, if it's truly given up to God, that can we give this up to God? Then we are not the ones who have the final say. And it might be that we are asked to change in ways that we can't understand yet, but we just have to continue to walk and figure it out. It's not always easy to do, but we need to keep giving it up, keep opening, keep taking the step that's in front of us when it's presented. I hope you continue working on your entrepreneurial and spiritual path. Here's my update on this podcast. It's not technically going anywhere. It's gonna be here. What I'm gonna stop doing is the pressure that I need to publish a weekly podcast because I want this to be something where I share something that feels really inspired. I'm not sure if I'm gonna move to Seasons or not, but I still want to keep this channel open. And so still keep it on your download and download it if you haven't listened to this when you're not downloaded. But I want to keep this channel open and I also want to open the opportunity to have conversations that I really care about. There have been people I reach out to where I'm like, I'm so excited to have this person on where it's really easy to reach out, and that's fun for me. But to try to be on the hamster wheel of continuing to fill spots just for the sake of filling spots doesn't feel rewarding wording. But there are really cool people out there doing interesting things. And when I feel the connection to have them on and to have a conversation, I want to bring them and help them or show them to you and do that too. So the podcast is kind of moving in the same direction, I guess that my newsletter is, or that my meditation world is, is that it's more flow, it's less accountable to a weekly schedule. And yes, that's probably gonna make the listeners go down because there are some people, maybe you are waiting for this to come out on Tuesday and listening to it. And I hear that, and I know that that's the risk I'm taking with this. But at the same time, it feels good to just open up some space and to do this in a way that that has a bit more flow. I'm making this decision after a hundred plus straight episodes. Ish. I did miss one week in January or December, I believe. But I'm doing this after a committed move. So I still believe that you should commit to something and have consistency and then after you've done it for a hundred times, figure out how to go forward from there. So this is my way to go forward and the best way to stay connected on all of it is please to join my email list. If you are not on on it, you can do it in the description below, whether through the free course Meditation Script Mastery or I'll try to make sure that there's a link below that has my email. You just go to my website too Lou Redmond.com and you can sign up to my email list. But that's the best way that you'll be notified of new things coming up and everything that I'm going, everything that I'm doing, whatever is happening for me, for my work, I love to just let you in on that journey. That's part of the intention of this podcast that I in the beginning was just hey, this is what I've experienced. I hope it's helpful. It's always been a gift. It started from a gift energy of just wanting to give back to up and coming meditation teachers and coaches and that's been great. It's been beautiful to see this gift out there. I'll still be giving it. It just might change flavor cadence. I hope you can understand. I hope you stay with me and I'm sending you so much love. I am rooting for you always on your journey. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being a part of this and we'll chat soon. This is not a goodbye, it's a see you later, see you when the spirit moves. And yeah, have a great day. 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.