It’s curious how the stories we often tell ourselves about why we can’t do what we want, why we can’t have what we want, why we can’t be who and how we want to be roll around in our heads. Sometimes silently, stalking and waiting for the moments when your boundaries are down and then BAM! There it is! The side swipe.. Other times it’s so freaking loud that you can’t even drown the thoughts out.

 

You can’t do that, because you don’t know enough yet.

 

You can’t have that because you don’t have the time, the money, the looks, the figure, the audience, the energy, the out thereness, the in thereness, the confidence, the sass, the humour… the whatever it is that you feel like you NEED in order to get things happening, to have the success you’re craving.

 

I had a business that was doing $1M/year. I was rocking it out! But I wanted more. Not ‘more’ in the sense of more money, although that would have been ridiculously amazing! It was that I wanted to do more of what I felt like was the work that I’m here to do.

 

I felt like I was almost a technical teacher, a tech help desk and it was slowly but surely eating away at my soul. It was how I ‘earned my name’ in ‘The Industry’. It was how I was able to help a LOT of people.. but I was yearning for more depth in the work that I was doing from the onset.

 

I knew, the same that you know all of the things of the soul, that I was meant for more than ‘I can’t work out what button to click now to make this landing page integrate properly’. It was slowly killing my motivation, my joy and my desire to bring people in, in this way.

 

The work that I was doing at a higher level with clients fuelled me. It filled me up. It lit me up. It was mindset work, deep work, helping people to remember who the fuck they are…. And man it was like an addiction. I just wanted to do more of that.

 

When you get a glimpse of what your genius is, and you start to work in that space more and more, everything else that you ‘try’ to do that is outside of that zone of genius starts to go stale.

 

It can start to stagnate. It can start to whittle away and chip away at your resolve, your confidence and even your faith…..

 

Because too often, in my experience and it’s the same for clients when I talk to them about it, when they find their genius, they find their way, they start to play with it more and more, you start realising that the money you might make doing something that goes against your very soul work, it just isn’t worth it.

 

And so I pretty much burned my business to the ground. It took a while to get there. It took some pretty freaking HUGE, ginormous and un-ignorable signs from the Universe that I had to drop it like it’s hot and move into doing my SOUL WORK. The work of my genius. The thing that lights me up each and every single day.

 

It’s hard to find motivation and inspiration when you’re doing something that feels forced.

 

When you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to do the work that you’re really here to do (be it for this moment, this season, this year, this decade, this life), you can’t turn your back on it for too long and ignore it. It’s like the pull on your soul strings create the tension between where you are right now, what you need to let go of and where you want to grow to, the human you want to grow into…

 

You can’t ignore your genius once you’ve met it, because it creates a tantrum!!!! And you know what happens? It just gets louder. And louder. And louder. Until you can no longer put it off.

 

So there’s that piece of the puzzle when it comes to business….

 

But there are also the limiting beliefs that kick in.

 

For me, I didn’t believe that people would pay me the same (or more) money than what they were if I wasn’t providing the technical support for how to do things. Um. Well. That may or may not have been true.

 

I didn’t believe that I would be able to stand out amongst all of the other people out there who were doing the deeper work. Intuitive coaching, marketing strategy, the balance between flow and structure. I thought people would think I was playing in a field I had no business playing in..

 

Which is all total horseshit, right?

 

I mean, FFS Nicola!!! Don’t you think you’re here to do the work that you’re here to do, and when you’re doing the work that you’re here to do, you’ll have more financial abundance, physical abundance, health abundance, spiritual abundance… ALL of the freaking abundance in all areas of your life?  Uh duh. Of course!

 

But I was scared.

 

Like when I left The Bank to work full time in my business, I was scared of what may or may not happen. But I jumped anyway.

 

I didn’t have any reference points for it working or not. I just had a bucket the size of the universe of anticipation, courage and grit, excitement and if this doesn’t work, I’ll be ok.

 

For me, letting go though, as the years went on, of the certainty that comes along with knowing you can sell something and do ‘alright’ (I know it was doing well! Don’t slap me!) so I could do the work that I really wanted to do was very hard. In fact, I needed to be pushed out of it. You know when you ask for the signs and the signs come but you ignore them until the signs are SO FREAKING LOUDLY OVERWHELMING that you can no longer ignore them? Yep. That’s what happened for me.

 

I finally let it go.

 

At the start of 2018 I pretty much started my business from scratch all over again. Admittedly I had a database of people who were business owners, I had my Facebook page with a bunch of people who followed me, but I needed to transition the message somewhat and steer it away from the more structured and functional “This is how you market yourself on Facebook” to more having more heart and soul. I learned more about me in that year than I had in a while.

 

I tested some things again, dipped my toe back into some of the things that I did in the past, because, well, apparently I needed to verify that I had made the right decision. I had!

 

I declared at the start of 2018 that this was it. If it wasn’t fun I wasn’t doing it.

 

If I needed to compromise on what my heart and soul wanted, I wasn’t doing it.

 

I decided that I didn’t care if I didn’t get back to making what I was making before, because it wasn’t worth ‘selling my soul’ for it.

 

I wholeheartedly launched into finding MY way of finding my way!

 

Some things worked and some didn’t.

 

The resolve that I came into 2019 with was different again. I decided to upend and throw in the bin any remnants of anything that was still hanging around. I’m talking about old beliefs, old stories that I used to tell myself about HOW to make money, what I needed to sell, how I needed to position myself, how I had to do things and I had the MOST FUN year of my business to date!

 

I have continued to push the boundaries of my own limited thinking. My own limiting beliefs. The things that I thought MUST be true and took for granted are and were gone. Annihilated.

 

Why?

 

Because I believe that YOU (and I, obviously!) can have what we want, we can BE whoever the hell we want to be, that we can do what we want to do….. IF we are doing the work of our genius.

 

When you are working with the people who you are meant to be working with.

 

When you are showing up as YOU, the REAL you.

 

When you are committed to having FUN (yes, you can have fun in business, in marketing, in creativity and in money making!!) things have a funny way of working out.

 

When you let go of all of the old programming that “You have to work hard to be successful”  this one’s a doozy, by the way! Because you still need to hustle. You still need to work hard… BUT you don’t need to pour every ounce of your body, energy and soul into what you’re doing 25 hours a day, 9 days a week to make it happen. Work hard PART TIME if you want. Just be present and committed to doing what you need to do. Sit your ass down and do the work till it’s done. If it takes 2 hours and you’re done, then you’re done! If it takes 8, then it takes 8 and you’re done.

 

Bottom line, though, is when you’re doing your genius work, it won’t always feel like ‘work’….. it will feel more like joy and flow. There’ll be times where you’re challenged, because that’s life. It’s part of the human experience. But you’ll get through it.

 

The best possible piece of advice I can give to you is this:

 

Don’t delay, don’t hold back and don’t second guess that which is your genius work.

 

Find a way to do more of that. You’ll be rewarded with all of the abundant, lavish RICHNESS that the world, the universe, God an possibly bestow on you. Including money. Including time. Including wonderful amazing clients….

 

Where some days you’ll literally pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming. That THIS is the exact life that you wanted all along.

 

You’re creating change.

 

You’re helping people.

Your genius is out there in the world, helping transform your clients and their lives one by one.

 

You’re such a badass. It’s time to stop doing the things that you feel like you have to do because you ‘have to make money’ or you ‘have to get clients’.

 

Like an arrow in a bow, sometimes you have to draw back in order to explode.

 

You’ve got this.