Feel safe being more visible with this simple somatic practice

This transcript has been automatically created and minimally edited/formatted. As such, there may be some errors in the text.
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[Episode preview]

Business owners, whether you have an audience of five people, an audience of 600 people, an audience of 6000 people, whatever it is as business owners, we need to be visible. We and our work need to be seen by more people than are going to buy so that we can run businesses that financially empower our thriving and empower us to keep running and building our businesses. Visibility is central. It is key to expanding our businesses. What is one step that you could take to support yourself in feeling even more safe, being present while being visible?

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[Podcast Intro]
Hey, welcome to the Sustainable Success podcast. This is your home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I’m Carly Jo Bell, the Sustainable Success mentor and your guide on this journey with self trust as your North Star and foundations under your feet, you’ll be able to look external for ideas, internal, for answers and build your business your way. Let’s dive in.
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[Episode begins]

a couple of weeks ago. I had truly like the absolute honor of hosting nine of our clients inside of the Big hearted entrepreneurs, Facebook group where they gave trainings to our audience to our community all as part of expansion week, which I’m hoping becomes an annual thing. I, oh my gosh, it has, I don’t even have the right words, but it’s just been truly amazing to get to learn from these business owners who are normally in a reversed position where they’re learning from me, but me getting to attend all of their trainings and, and learn from them and see not only like, you know, them implementing the things that they have learned while working with me and working with our team, but also just getting to see their expertise, like them standing in their expertise. Oh my gosh, I think I’ve said like a million times that usually happens when I’m being very effusive about something, but I just was so honored. It was amazing. And, you know, we had trainings from a certified sex coach on doing an intimate strengths inventory. That training was just made me think about myself in the context of intimacy in such a different way than I had ever thought about it. That was amazing. You know, we have a parenting coach, bringing in a training on discover your inner parenting manual. We had an operations and client experience consultant, talking about how to rekindle stale relationships like, you know, relationships where you have, you’re like, I really want to collaborate with this person. This person is so amazing. I see how we could like mutually fa each other’s business schools here and yet I, for whatever reason, life got busy. I totally just have not even stayed connected with them. How do I rekindle that relationship so that I can in a more human way pitch that we do a collaboration together. Another business owner brought in a low cost lunch to test and develop your idea. We had a website designer bring in getting your brand website ready, a therapeutic coach helping us to discover our clear path to true transformation. We had another coach bring in Make room to bloom where she walks us through how to actually start developing a relationship with our inner critic. We had the roadmap to quantum leap in money or love. And we also had a training from a productivity and implementation coach on how to actually accomplish more of what matters to you. It truly was a freaking phenomenal week. I personally learned so much. I loved every single training like it was just, it was amazing. And during this week, I also brought a brand new training in something that I’ve actually, I don’t think ever publicly like outside of a course or a program really showcased or shared. And because it was just something that, you know, I was so I’m so proud of truthfully like I really loved that conversation. And because it’s something that I’ve seen being really valuable with our clients in our client work, I want to also share my training here with you. Now, of course, if you want to watch any of the other trainings from the amazing business owners who, you know, I just listed out the trainings, the lineup that we had then head over to the big hearted entrepreneurs group on Facebook. And that link will be down below in the show notes, but we have all those replays in there. And of course, right after this, right after I stopped talking, talking in this intro, I guess because obviously I’ll be talking in the next part. You’ll also get to hear that training that I did. What you’ll find in this training is I’m going to show you one way, one very practical way that you can resource yourself to be even more visible in your business so that you can show up in your expertise with even more confidence and clarity. So I’m going to stop gabbing away here, stop this introduction and I’m going to go ahead and yeah, open up the training here for you to listen to as well. Thanks so much. Hello, friends. Welcome to my training today where I am sharing a simple somatic practice to increase your sense of safety in visibility. I don’t know if you know this, if you’ve been around for a while, you might. But I grew my business to six figures and then multi six figures with an audience of less than 600 people. But I don’t share that as a like and so cool. I share that as a reminder or really as like a bit of context for what I’m about to talk about today. Because notice the figure in what I just shared less than 600 people, which meant that for the vast majority of my time in business, I’m going on six years here for the vast majority of my time in business. I was used to having an audience where I mostly knew everyone I had at least had some sort of interaction with them or I have seen them in some, you know, online somewhere like I knew for the most part, the people in my audience, that’s a great thing. And at a certain point, if you want to grow your business beyond in the way that I would like to grow my business, you have to have a bigger audience than that. And so because I had this amazing group of about 600 people, even less than that, I was amazing. Like I had the great relationships and I was not used to a large amount of visibility. And so much of the last couple of years have been me learning how to actually like, feel, ok, being more broadly visible, more uncontrollably visible, more in front of people that I do not know and maybe have never ever interacted with. This first came up for me when I released my podcast a couple of years ago. When was that 2022 maybe, I think at 2022 I released our podcast and I had so much difficulty actually sitting down to record episodes. All my work. It was like one of the hardest things I had ever done in my business was sitting down and recording podcast episodes and looking back, I didn’t fully see this then. But looking back, I can see that the biggest reason for that was that I was terrified of the uncontrollable visibility that a podcast inherently brings. Whereas in a Facebook group or on an email list, I’m used to being able to see, oh, these people opened this email list or this email or these people are in the group with a podcast. I get a random number that says so many downloads and I have no idea who those people were unless of course they say, oh I loved such and such episode to me, but that doesn’t happen very regularly. Uncontrollable visibility was something that I was not used to and something that was frankly terrifying for me to the point that it really kind of incited quite a bit of procrastination in me and a lot of other patterns of resistance. Why do I share this? Because as business owners, whether you have an audience of five people, an audience of 600 people, an audience of 6000 people, whatever it is, as business owners, we want to be visible. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that we need to be visible, right? We, we and our work need to be seen by more people that are going to buy so that we can run businesses that financially empower our thriving and empower us to keep running and building our businesses. Like this is actually just kind of like a statistical thing. We have to have more people see what we’re doing than the people who buy visibility. As a business owner means clients. It means larger communities benefiting either directly or indirectly from our work. It means you actually getting to do the work that you love and want to do. Visibility is central. It is key to expanding our businesses. And at the same time, however, I really do not believe that our human bodies were built to be seen by dozens or hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of faceless energies. Which if you think about it as an online business owner, you being visible for the most part is a bunch of faceless energies looking at you, which for me anyway, I can feel that I can sense that and I don’t believe that our human bodies are meant to experience that or built to experience that. Now, that doesn’t mean that that’s not something that we can work with. And obviously that’s why we’re here. And I like to just start by recognizing that that shit is fucking scary. I like to start by recognizing that, that feels like a lot. And especially when we start adding in, we’re not only being seen, but we also are needing to be seen in some level of expertise and we’re kind of having to like take up space and claim that and we will be a leader and all of these things, the responsibilities that come with that visibility is frequently something that our clients here at Holdco struggle with or feel unsafe with or have difficulty with over yesterday today. And also tomorrow, you’re meeting some of our clients here at Expansion Week. And you know, some of these people have never gone live before. Maybe they have, but they’ve never done a presentation or a training like this before in front of somebody else’s audience. Maybe they’ve never presented in an audience of 1500 people before. And all of those things can feel scary whether you’re doing them for the very first time or you’ve already done them maybe hundreds or dozens or whatever amount of times I know for me even, I literally have gone live so frequently. Like I think in 2021 I went live once or twice a week here in this group, 2022 a little bit less. But I still was going live like I’ve gone live a lot of times before that it was live on Instagram back when I used to spend time on Instagram. Like I have gone live so many times and yet today when I was about five minutes from hitting the go live button here, my face started getting flushed. My thoughts started racing and I was like, fidgeting you and I kind of just wanted to like, push the gold life button even before it was time. And I was like, what’s going on here? Oh, yeah. Hey, look a little bit of se of visibility. I’ve done this so many times and yet it’s still hit me and I share that to say that I actually do not believe that being visible, especially in these like kind of larger and online ways that we are asked to as online business owners to do is ever going to fully feel safe. I think it can feel more safe. I can, I think that it can feel even easier and I don’t think that it’s ever really like a journey with a specific end. I think its just an ongoing journey. And at the same time when we recognize that not only does that now open up a little bit of permission for this to maybe if we still feel a little scary, but it also gives us an opportunity to recognize, hey, if I want to be visible because I know what visibility brings to me as a business owner, but also to the world, you know, the humans that are looking for my exact brand of magic and expertise. If I know that I want to be visible. I have an opportunity here to expand my capacity for visibility, to build up an inner sense of safety that allows me to be present while being visible. Now, I want to share a practice with you today that will support you to expand that capacity to be present. But I need you to understand one thing. First, I cannot help you instantaneously feel safe being visible. That would 100% be over promising if I made that claim for a quite relatively short training, not to mention building capacity to actually be present while experiencing things, whether we’re experiencing something good or bad, that takes work. That is a journey. It’s a journey and it’s a cyclical journey where we just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, kind of ever increasing our capacity to be present. So we’re not going to suddenly fix things today nor can we really ever fix things all the way I think here. Nor do we even mean to be fixed, which is a little bit of a another way of looking at this. But what we can do here together today and what you can do and what we kind of starting here together today is you consistently meeting yourself in the felt experience of visibility and gradually piece by piece, expanding your physiological ability to be present invisibility. Notice my language here we are talking about expanding your ability to be present, being visible. While being visible present in your body while being visible. This is not about healing your visibility wounds. This is not about getting rid of all of your fears around visibility. This is about expanding your capacity to be present in your body while you are being visible. Before this training me noticing my face flushing me noticing that my thoughts start racing. Me noticing, I just wanna get this over already. I’m gonna push the go live button and just do the thing. Me noticing those things is me being present in my body while I am being visible or in that case, preparing to be visible. It’s at present with the sensation. That’s what we’re looking to achieve here. And that is no small feat. The great news though is that again, this journey compounds and what we’re doing today here might be our very first step, might be our 1000th step. But what it’s going to do my hope anyway is that it will give you something tangible that you can practice a resource that you kind of have in your tool kit as a business owner, but also as a human to consistently piece by piece, inch by inch, bit by bit, expand your capacity to be present while being visible. So with that, I do want to introduce you to again this very simple practice that is an entry point into cultivating the capacity to stay present while being visible. Of course, though this practice is only one teeny tiny part of this journey of building this capacity. But like I said, when you do this practice once and then you can come back to it and kind of again, the cyclical process, you’ll find that the results compound every time to the point where it really is. One of those things that you’ll often come to some point in the future where you’re like, oh my gosh, I just, let’s say went live. And I didn’t, you know, I didn’t have any stress about it beforehand. I just was able to sit down and do the thing. Now, that doesn’t mean that we fully healed all your visibility things that it still might show up in other ways. But again, it’s that compounding journey that we’re working toward in this practice. I am going to invite you to close or lower your eyes for a part of it. So I do invite you if you can, that you find a space here with me that you have 8 to 10 minutes of uninterrupted time and space. If you’re not able to make that space for yourself right now, then I invite you to still follow along. Still listen. But you might not maybe be able to do the full practice or you might not be able to do any of the practice. But that’s ok. You can still listen, you can still see what the process is. And then when you have that space where you will have a little bit of uninterrupted time. Maybe you’ll want to come back and do this process at that moment. Now, normally you would start this process organically, right in the sense of, you know, I’m sitting down, my face is flushing because I’m about to go live. I’m gonna recognize like, oh, my face is flushing right now. I’m gonna, you know, I wanna explore this for a moment or maybe I don’t have the time right now to explore this, but I’m taking note of it and I’m gonna look at it later. So normally we would want to like in that moment where you notice something arising inside of you in relation to visibility to do this process or again to take note of what you’re noticing and come back to it later when you have this space to do this process. Of course, though, for our purposes here, I can’t guarantee that you’re feeling any type of way about visibility in this moment. So we’re gonna have a little bit of a manufactured entry point. I invite you in this manufacturing our entry point moment here to find at least one situation or experience of visibility where you find it either difficult or challenging or where you kind of just like to now. And like when I just pushed through it and one experience or situation of visibility that you want to work with here today, and let’s just keep it within the confines of business specifically just for our simplicity’s sake. Maybe it is for you like, you know, trying to go live. That’s something you wanted to do and you haven’t done it because that feels a little terrifying. Or maybe it’s posting on Instagram and it is something that you do want to do and you do do it. But maybe you find yourself waiting until the end of every day like, oh shit, I need to create a caption or I need to, you know, create a reel or whatever it is because it’s just that little bit of fear. Maybe around that visibility, maybe it’s participating in a bundle or summit idiots putting a post up, not getting any engagement. It could even be things like getting unsubscribes on your emails. Yes, that is a form of visibility or sending an email. And now someone has said I don’t want to be here who you know, or maybe it’s having only one or two clients show up to a group coaching session. Maybe it’s running a discovery call, find one visibility experience that you want to work with in this practice. And I do wanna let you know we have intended these trainings to be about 20 minutes. I wanted to bring you this whole thing and I’ve started, you know, I’m the one running our expansion week. So I decided I wanted to give you a little bit more than 20 minutes, but we are coming up to our 20 minute time, if that’s all the time you have for today and you might want to come to the replay. So do you have your visibility experience ready to work with? If so, I’m gonna share some prompts with you and I invite you to follow along. My invitation to you is as I share these prompts to let whatever first arises within you to just be the answer, there are no right or wrong answers. And even if it’s something that comes up, it feels silly or like where did that come from or whatever it is? I invite you to trust it, follow it. Maybe humor yourself right now, right? Like humor yourself throughout this experience. And there might also be moments as I share some prompts or some questions where you don’t have an immediate answer. Maybe it’s a little bit muffled. That is totally OK. You are allowed to have your experience. You are allowed to skip over things that don’t land or resonate for you. There’s no way to do this process wrong. I simply invite you to let this be an opportunity to practice trusting yourself first and foremost, especially before you ever trust me. All right. So let’s go ahead and get started. Let’s hold that visibility experience that you’re gonna work with in your brain. We’re gonna come to that in a moment. But first, can you look around the room slowly? A name either quietly to yourself or out loud. Three things that you can see. Can you name two things that you are touching right now and finally, can you name one thing that you can hear, which might even be me. And when you’re ready, go ahead and close or lower your eyes as it feels safe to do so and simply notice your breath. You don’t need to change it, just notice it. And let’s bring our focus our attention to the top of our head and then at your own pace, I invite you to allow your attention to move from the top of your head all the way down to your toes, body part by body part. And when you do get to your toes, just wiggle them for a moment. All we’re doing here is allowing you to arrive right here right now. Next, if it feels safe, I invite you to take both of your hands and place them on your chest over your heart space. Can you find one thing that you feel grateful for today? Whatever that is no matter how big, how small can you imagine that feeling of gratitude entering from your hands into your heart space and moving wherever it needs to throughout your body. Now, let’s bring back that visibility experience that you came up with before the one where you maybe find it challenging or difficult or even scary to experience or even think of experiencing that form of visibility as you bring that back to your attention. Notice what sensations are arising in your body as you imagine yourself doing or experiencing or even thinking about doing or experiencing that thing? Where do you have sensation in your body as you consider that visibility experience? And can you describe that sensation not really using emotion language? We don’t need to know the emotion here. What we really care about is how does it feel your jaw tight? Is your stomach kind of squiggly? Are you clenching your fists? What does this sensation feel like? Now, imagine that that sensation exited your body and was sitting in front of you. What does that sensation look like? You can just trust whatever image arises. And if you’re not someone who visualizes, can you maybe instead get a sense of its energy or a kind of color or a smell of it? Seeing that sensation in front of you? Now, if it could talk, what made it say you’re doing such a great job? Now, what does this sensation want or need from you? If its answer is something that you can give to it, can you do that? Now if what it needs from you is something that you can’t give to it. What can you give to it in this moment? Once youve done that, this sensation has a gift for you. What is that gift? Maybe its a flower, maybe it means something for you. Maybe it has a hug for you. Maybe it even has some words of wisdom for you. What is that gift? And you get to decide, do you want to accept this gift? You’re in full control here. Now, let’s go ahead and bring your highest or your wisest self into this picture with you and this sensation. If you don’t have access to a highest self, then maybe you’ll choose to instead bring a trusted mentor into the picture with you and this sensation of visibility. What does your highest self want you to know about being visible? Invite you to trust, whatever comes up and asking your highest self for their wisdom. What is one step that you could take to support yourself and feeling even more safe being present while being visible? What in their wisdom, do they know that you could do to feel even more safe being visible? Finally, when you’re ready, I invite you to grasp hands with both your highest self and that sensation of being visible so that the three of you form a circle. And if it feels aligned, I invite you to ask your highest self to fill both you and the sensation of visibility with whatever energy you both need to move forward, invisibility in a right for you way. What energy does your highest self want to give to you? And the sensation of visibility so that you can feel safe and that you can move forward, being visible in your business. Let that energy flow up your hands and into your arms, shoulders and head and all the way through the rest of your body until it has reached every single crevice and nook and cranny. And when you’re ready, I invite you to open or raise your eyes very slowly with both your eyes and your head, look around the room and let your eyes land on five different points in the room around you. But we’ve just done here together is spent some time getting to know the sensations that arise within you specifically in the context of visibility of being visible, of being seen. So often, we wanna just push through the uncomfortable sensations that arise inside of us around visibility. We want to just pretend that they’re not there or try to just force ourselves to get over something already and pushing through can take us a certain distance, but it can only take us so far. And speaking of someone who tried to push through most things in my life for much of my life, I can share from personal experience that a pattern of pushing through is not only exhausting, it can eventually lead to burn out or breakdown places that we all know. We don’t really want to go pushing through though is not only exhausting, it also tends to exacerbate the things that we are trying to push through those things end up getting louder, more intense. Whereas when we allow ourselves to actually experience those things that we’ve been trying to push through what we are actually doing is moving them from the shadows and into the light. And in doing so, we’re becoming the observer of those sensations of those internal experiences. And one of the most powerful side effects of being the observer in our own reality, our own inner experiences is that by the very fact that we are observing, we are recognizing that this thing that we’ve been trying to avoid or ignore or push through or whatever might be part of us. But it is not all of us, it is part of us. And it is a part that is worthy of our curiosity, our care, our compassion, but it is not all of us when we recognize this, that allows us to both experience the thing that we are experiencing and do so without judgment or shame. But also to tap into the other resources that we have available inside of us, including our adult brains, the wisdom of our highest self. So that we can see that we are equipped to both support this fearful part of ourselves, this uncomfortable, this, you know, tense or whatever that sensation is part of ourselves. And at the same time to take aligned action, how and when we desire to take it, we can both do other things to be more visible and support ourselves, support the parts of ourselves who do not feel safe being visible. So the next time that you find yourself doing something in your business that brings up this uncomfortable sensation. I invite you to first and foremost notice it and when you notice it, celebrate yourself for noticing it because that in and of itself is a huge step is huge progress. The ability to notice when our body is showing us something about, oh, I don’t know about this or oh, I’m feeling uncomfortable here. That ability is in and of itself huge. But then when you notice it and you celebrate yourself for noticing it, can you take it through this simple somatic practice? Locate the sensation in your body. Where is it is in your stomach? Is it in your chest, in your jaw, in your hands? Where is it describe what that sensation feels like? Not using emotion language, sensation, language. What does it feel like? And what does it look like? What made it say? What does it need? Can you give it that take it through this whole process exercises like this one are ones that I’ll often give to expand clients in the feedback videos that I provide on their module, check ins in our boxer office hours in our monthly Q and A when they’re faced with some of the more uncomfortable businessy them. Of course, we also do a lot of practical business building work, but it’s this type of support that is so important to also have alongside doing the practical business building work because it’s often by doing the practical business building work to grow our businesses that we are then met with these inner sensations and experiences that we don’t want or that we don’t, you know, that are in some way holding us back or that we just feel like I wanna just push through or we don’t want to experience and yet we actually do because by experiencing them, they lose their power, they lose the ability to prevent us from taking steps and doing things that we do actually want to do. Like our, you know, adult brains know, oh, I do want to do that thing. They lose their power. And at the same time though, they become a piece of ourselves that we see with curiosity and compassion, we both regain our power to actually do the things we want to do. Relatively uninterrupted and come to love ourselves even more. If you’re ready to become equipped on both an inner and outer level to sustainably call in a steady stream of clients and stabilize your cash flow while building the foundations for a business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue that I invite you to come and join us inside of expand our comprehensive business training program. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here a little bit longer and I am really cheering for you as you continue this journey, hopefully of increasing your capacity to be seen to be visible in your business. I’m celebrating you. I’m grateful for you. And again, the doors are open to you of expand when and if you’re ready for them. Thanks so much, everybody.

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[Podcast Outro]
Thanks for listening to the Sustainable Success podcast. You’re home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I truly believe that these are the conversations we need to be having more of in our online business community. If you know too, would you leave me a review and/or share this episode with the friends?
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