My Undoing Began with an $80k Month (the TRUE journey of Sustainable Success)

Sustainable Success Mentor & Business Consultant Carly Jo Bell takes listeners on a personal journey of undoing and self-discovery, revealing how her biggest month in business led to a profound transformation.

She shares her realization that more money doesn’t necessarily equate to true safety and how this realization sparked a deep inner journey of healing and self-connection. Through therapy, somatic work, and ongoing introspection, Carly Jo navigated her undoing, ultimately finding her true purpose and embracing her mission of Sustainable Success.

She emphasizes the importance of shedding societal expectations and stepping into one’s authentic self to build businesses that bring as much joy as they do revenue. Through her story, she invites listeners to explore their own journeys of expansion as well as what their entry point into Sustainable Success may be.

Follow the invitation into the next era of your Sustainable Success in business by seeing everything she offers, here: https://wholeco.media/everything 

ABOUT CARLY:

Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and founder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.

For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, stop by https://www.wholecomedia.com. 

TRANSCRIPT:

“EXPAND is how I serve.” I sat there in my favorite place in the world—a sunny meadow with soft grass between forests of trees with a flowing river on the side and a sunflower and peony garden and a warm white house in the background. It’s a place my physical body has never actually been in this lifetime but that my soul knows more clearly than any other place in my present reality. 

For the first time ever I saw the golden yellow orb of power resting calmly in my stomach, and noticed that it connected through a barely visible string to my truest essence, the sun in the sky, thereby connecting my power source to that of the universe, and in the process, the distinction between me and everyone and everything around me blurred. We became one.

My concept of self dissolved, though I maintained my wholeness as I became part of everything. In this state, a voice arose from deep within everything, “EXPAND is how I serve. Keep going.”

Just over a year prior, it was the first of January. The beach across the street was largely empty, which left plenty of space for my energy to spread out and feel unobstructed by the cacophony of energy that filled these streets on each warm summers day.

Despite having been on vacation, I had already collected over $50k in contracts to be signed by clients ready to work with me. I floated through this month deeply connected to my own power to create exactly what I desired to create, and found myself alive and thriving on January 31 with over $80k worth of contracts signed. It was then my biggest month ever.

What I did not know then is that this was the beginning of my undoing. 

An undoing of my beliefs around success. An undoing of the picked up pieces of my identity. An undoing of the strings that I had wrapped tightly around my body in an effort to hold together a sense of self that had been battered and bruised and even broken by so many painful parts of my life’s journey.

The undoing began slowly, until eventually it engulfed my entire being. The journey was terrifying, exhausting, and in many ways in many moments sent me into hiding. But what I now see from this space of interconnectedness and blurred lines between who I am and everything around me, is that this undoing was precisely what I needed to uncover who I am meant to be and how I am meant to lead.

My undoing became the key. They key to true, lasting, Sustainable Success in my business. The key to my thriving as a human being. The key to my purpose. The key to finding and being and embodying me.

I’ll tell you the story, first because I continue to practice being seen, but also because part of how I serve is by inviting you into your depths, into a greater understanding of our interconnectedness, into expanded purpose, fulfillment, and potentially, into your undoing so that you can shed the layers of who you’re supposed to be in favor of who you are and how you are meant to lead. This is how we build businesses that bring you as much joy as they do revenue. This is the key to expansion and sustainability.

My name is Carly Jo Bell. My title is Sustainable Success Mentor and Business Consultant. My people are business owners, service providers, coaches, healers, and guides. My work supports them in getting paid really freaking well to do the work they MOST love doing, in the way they MOST love doing it, with the people they MOST love working with.

My clients consistently tell me that I seamlessly blend business strategy with the spiritually-minded and somatic practices required to become a better, more in love with life human being.

If you’ve been in business for years like I have, you know that business is a petri dish version of life. It’s a testing ground. A fertile garden. It is a place where you can experiment and play and come to embody all of the qualities and characteristics that will strengthen and solidify your sense of wholeness and connection to all things.

It is from this knowing that I am here to share how a milestone month led me to undoing everything I thought I knew about me and my reality and to becoming the version of myself who can step into and live out of my big purpose from a grounded and secure sense of me.

Let’s return then to our story. 

For years up to this $80k sales month, I had been operating on the belief that more money meant more safety and more safety was what I really needed. I built my entire business—everything from my offers to my messaging to my marketing—around this idea that creating more and more and more money was what we as humans truly needed. Of course, I knew on some level that what we desired went so much further than more money, but unknowingly a part of me was stuck in the concept that safety came from outside of me. That safety came from money.

It’s no wonder, therefore, that when I secured “enough” money to feel like I could actually take a second to breathe, my body collapsed. I was now secure enough in this financial safety to finally do the work of healing that my inner being knew I needed, but that every part of me wanted to flee from and fight against.

It doesn’t feel good to be swimming in the depths of anxiety.

For the next year, I went inward. Not out of choice, but out of necessity. Some part of me knew that if I was going to survive this period that felt like drowning and come out on the other side still capable of breathing, I had to pay attention to the parts of me who had been crying out for my attention, but whom I had ignored recklessly. It took me a while to recognize, but it was their tears I was swimming in and therefore it was their healing that was my key.

I did several types of therapy. I did somatic work. I went from being someone who had no connection with any part of my body below my neck to someone who seemingly overnight began to feel everything.

There were moments that were too much. Moments I had to numb, to tune out, to somehow find a way to breathe even if all I could do was breathe shallowly. But there were also moments I am proud of.

The moment I spent 30 minutes in a body-based therapy session wordlessly moving through the rage that had been shrouded in sadness which coursed powerfully through every part of me at the recalling of that one memory. The moment my physical therapist touched the inside of my knee without causing me intense anxiety, and I sobbed tears of joy in her arms over the fact that I had found even this small sense of safety. The moment I reopened myself to my love, and we shared a sacred connection once again for the first time in my year of “nobody touch me.”

These moments were the ray of sunlight that kept me going through this dark, internal journey. They were the sign I needed that more light was coming, I simply had to keep going.

Eventually I realized which way was up and which was down, and I emerged quietly and naturally on the shoreline and found that somehow I could once again breathe.

One year later, on January 8th, I was deep in visualization, more grounded in my body than I had ever known I could be. I had been learning about the power of surrender, and after my year of undoing, intentional surrender from a place of power felt like the natural next “thing.” 

I was asking questions, like: How do I surrender to the more than me? How do I feel safe opening myself to receive? How do I maintain my sense of me while choosing to dissolve into the interconnectedness of all things?

And so I found myself in my favorite place in the world—a sunny meadow with soft grass between forests of trees with a flowing river on the side, a sunflower and peony garden, and a warm white house sitting comfortingly in the background.

I noticed for the first time ever the golden yellow orb of power resting calmly in my stomach. I saw that thin but strong connection to the sun in the sky, and I knew immediately that this was me connecting my own power source with that of the universe. Finally. 

I allowed myself to dissolve and become one with this greater sense of being. 

And from this space I heard, “EXPAND is how I serve. Keep going.”

For the first time ever, I understood. I understood that it was time to release all of the things that were holding me back from serving at my highest capacity.

The “not enough.”

The “who am I?”

The “what will they think?”

The “am I dreaming too big here?”

The worries around whether it would work. Because, for the first time ever, I knew it would.

My year of undoing brought me here to a knowing of my calling and my purpose and the fullest, so far, expression of me. 

And it is from this place, that I’ve been able to dig deeper than the messages of “more money” and guide the humans who trust me as a mentor in their journey into real, lasting, Sustainable Success in their businesses, but also, in their human being.

Which is what I now am honored to invite you into. As a business owner with really big dreams, who desires to be a trailblazer, change maker, and a do things differently leader in your industry, you know that it is your job to be visible and able to be seen. You are ready to move beyond “how business has been done” and create the sturdy foundations and sustainable-for-you systems that support you in reaching the people who are actively seeking to step into the work and create the transformations guided by your unique expertise.

You are ready to expand beyond your next revenue goal, absolutely. But even more than that, you desire a mentor who will consistently point you back to your inner knowing to find answers and who also knows when to bring a well-timed piece of consulting, advice, or strategy—all so that you can usher in and expertly navigate each new era of your expanding Sustainable Success.

If building a Sustainably Successful business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue is what you desire and know in your being that you must do, I invite you to explore how I can support you as you expand into all that you know you are capable of being and creating.

Thank you for witnessing me in my story of undoing. May you receive exactly what you need to step even more deeply into the fullest expression of you that you desire to be.