What Is Your Anchor?

As creatives, there is no dearth of inspiration and new ideas for us to pursue. And that can often lead to us feeling a bit untethered. So in this episode, I am asking the question, what is your anchor?  For me, it is the concept and vision of a project that help me stay on track. Very recently, I have started the process of nailing down my branding, and it is having a ripple effect throughout my business. 

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Transcript

Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey, besties. What's up? How's everybody doing? I hope that you are having a good week. I'm doing pretty good. Um, I realized as I was thinking about today's podcast and preparing for it, that I always like, I'm always like, I'm doing great. I'm doing amazing. And that's not, not true, but I think it's important to also like, Transparent about the fact that I'm not always doing amazing overall.

I am usually doing amazing when I am like recording this podcast or working with my clients or creating content for the world because this is what I love doing and it's what I get the most fulfillment out of in my life. And it's my like main interest. But that very often, just like anyone else throughout the day, I'm having lots of ups and downs and.

You know, I've spoken before about my depression and like sometimes that's impacting my day, but like, yeah, the like 20 or 30 minutes that I'm sitting down to talk to you, I feel amazing and I feel aligned and I feel like very much on path with my purpose, which is kind of what we're gonna talk about today in a sense.

Yeah. Fun stuff that's going on with me is I actually took myself to hotel room this weekend. Basically to get work done . Um, so it wasn't like a, like a, like a fun getaway, but it's something I've been wanting to incorporate into my work life. And I had set a goal for this year to go away once a quarter, and it was kind of looking like that wasn't gonna happen just because of like, I hadn't done it yet and.

The next couple of like weeks. There wasn't really space for it, and then all of a sudden I just decided that it was gonna be this past weekend. I was like, I have this weekend. I can do it. And it was a really, really good idea. First of all, as you know, I work from home. I, I rarely leave the house like maybe once or twice a week I go to the grocery store or run some other kind of errand.

and a couple of times a month, I might see people socially, but it's not really common, and I have not gone away anywhere since September. So what is that, like six months ago? Yeah. I haven't gone anywhere. I haven't been away from my house overnight in six months, and so that's a little bit weird for someone who.

Previous to becoming a life coach, like I used to travel quite a lot for work, I would go and teach at studios, do dance intensives. I would judge dance competitions. And so to be in this place now where like I never go anywhere is super weird. So I ended up only being away for like 28 hours. I checked myself in on Friday afternoon, it was like three o'clock.

Um, where I went, there was like a Whole Foods and Starbucks and all these things really close by, so I like went out right away and like picked myself up some food for dinner to eat later. And then I got back to the hotel and I just started working on stuff and I'm super excited about all the stuff that I was working on.

We've got some stuff that's coming too, you, and then the next morning I did the same thing. I just like did work. I went out and got some lunch, came. And I ended up actually coming home, even though I was gonna stay again Saturday night, but I got all my work done. And let's be honest, I slept like shit at the hotel room.

There was like the heater in the room, like it would go on and off, right, like heaters do. But every time it would come back on, it was making like this like screeching, hissing noise that would wake me up and then I would wake up. And then I would be like, oh, now I'm awake. Oh, I need to go to the bathroom.

So then I would go into the bathroom and the lights were sensor lights. So you know that thing where you're like up in the middle of the night and you're like trying to keep your eyes closed and you're like groping your way to the bathroom. You're like, I'm still asleep, I'm still asleep, I'm still asleep.

And sometimes you can totally convince yourself you're still asleep. Well, fuck no you can't. When the lights burst on, when you walk into the bathroom cuz they're on a sensor. So this happened several times Friday evening as I was trying to sleep.  and I realized that like I did not need to sacrifice another night's sleep, especially with like daylight savings coming or whatever, whatever hellscape of time.

Shift we're in right now. I was like, I, I think I'm gonna go home. And I'm glad I did. We had a friend staying over and got to like, have dinner with him and have drinks and just hang out and it felt really good. So I am super proud of myself for kind of last minute. It was last minute. I decided Friday morning that I was gonna do this and I just made it happen.

And so I will say to you if there is something that you have been wanting to do for you, that you believe is gonna make like a really big impact. , but you just are like not making the time. Don't feel like you have the time. Fucking do it. Just do. I give you permission if you need someone's permission.

Not that you need my permission, but if you really need your permission, but if you're looking for outside validation or outside permission, I give you my permission. You are welcome. So today we're answering the question, what is your anchor? This came up for me. As I'm actually working on my branding with, um, my branding person, Kelly, who started out as my client and we, you know, work together to help her leave her corporate job and start her own job where she's helping small businesses, doing like branding and marketing stuff.

And now she's helping me with my branding and. Y'all. It's been so amazing. We've had like two meetings, but it's created so much clarity for me, and I'm just gonna tell you that this was exactly the thing that I needed. So rewind back to, I don't know, November I had decided, might have mentioned it that I wanted to sort of get some help with my business and I wasn't really sure what that help was gonna look like.

Did I want a va? Did I want, um, Help with marketing. Did I want help with? Was I gonna start running ads? Did I wanna like find someone to help me do that? Like I just felt like I could use a little extra support and there are certain things that I just don't wanna do. Like do I wanna create all my content or do I wanna have someone else create it?

And I didn't have answers to any of these questions, and so I actually reached out on a Facebook group to the group and was like, Hey, y'all. This is where I'm at. I don't wanna do this alone. And we get into this thing. I actually had this conversation with my friend Roberto. I was on his podcast, or we recorded an episode for his podcast.

I don't know when it's coming out, but just this idea in our community that like you have to do absolutely everything alone. And I think that a lot of this comes from some of my mentors who have been doing this for like 10, 12 years. , there was no other option, right? Like social media wasn't really a thing yet, and this whole kind of solopreneur thing was very new.

Coaching was still very new and. In order to have a business, you really did need to be able to do absolutely everything yourself within your business. And for some people it was definitely a financial thing, right? They're just, they didn't have the money to hire people. But then there was also like, there was nobody to hire.

And now we have this whole like gig economy, like you can, you can get like virtual VAs, like there's just so many things. Out there now to support a small business. I actually just found out about another company the other day that I, maybe I'll link it. That is helping out, um, l g BT Q solopreneurs, like people who are creating businesses and need support, like marketing support, like kind of the stuff that I'm talking about, but other stuff too.

Anyway, I got so many responses from that post in this Facebook group.  so many that I was actually completely overwhelmed. There were a lot of them were like, oh my God, me too. I want help. Some other people that were like, I totally got help in my business before I hit a hundred K. Which is kind of like the standard advice is like, you don't need help with anything until you hit a hundred K, like blah, blah.

Like it's like, okay, do you know me? Lots of that stuff. But then a lot of other suggestions. For everybody, like from virtual assistants to people who can do copy to people who can. Fully produce the podcast, which actually I do on my own entirely and is fairly easy for me to this new thing. This is like a new business that has popped up, but the O B M, does anybody know what an O B M is?

Cuz I didn't fucking know what an O B M was. I had to look it up. It's several people be like, oh my God, it sounds like you need an obm. And I was like, I don't know what that means. . OM stands for Online business manager. So it's like basically companies that will manage like all the aspects of your business, right?

You have an online business and they'll manage all these aspects of it. I mean, it sounds great. Not quite what I need though at this time, so, , I needed to leave that. I think I, I've definitely talked about this before, right? Being a, a reflector, like I was like, I need to leave all this information. I don't have a decision that I can make about it right now.

I need to have some space from it. So I gave myself some space from it and it's great cuz I knew that it was there. I could always go back and pick it up later. And eventually I started thinking about like, well, what do I actually want for my.  and where do I wanna go with it? Who do I wanna help more? How do I wanna help them?

And I was finding it sort of difficult to zero in on that. And then I decided that I needed to create some kind of consistency, right? Something that was gonna be a through line for me to focus. And this is when I reached out to Kelly and I was like, I would love to work with you on my branding. And so, , she was totally game and we started like having conversations about that.

Set up a couple meetings. Wright did like a whole sort of discovery meeting, talked through like what my goals are, what my business looks like now, what I want it to look like. She knows me fairly well from working with me for a year. And I also know her outside of working together, so she already had some ideas about like directions that she could take my branding, et cetera.

So we have our second meeting and it starts with the design themes. And the second that like this image popped up onto the screen, I felt my whole body just like. Relax and something clicked into place and I just, I fell in love with it, and it really felt like it was just me being reflected back to me on a screen in a way that I just couldn't explain and have never experienced.

And so we went through the whole thing and I just couldn't, like, stop being gagged on like, just how perfectly this sort of encapsulated me. Like the colors, the, the language. The images, it was just like, ah, so good. And I am so excited for you all to see all of this. Once it finally releases, when we unveil this new branding, which PS I'm gonna be like having new branding.

I'm gonna have a new website, all this stuff. So that's exciting news, right? I. Didn't lead with that, but we went through the two themes. There were two themes, and I really felt like the first theme was just it. Like I loved the second theme as well, but it felt a little bit more like it was a little busier, a little bit more chaotic, which is what my brain feels like all the time and right.

I was sort of looking for something to center me. And the first theme really, I could feel the centering as I looked at it, and so this became my anchor. We had that meeting and then immediately I was excited to start creating things and almost instantaneously I was able to make decisions about things that I had not been able to decide on.

Like I wanted to create a new free resource that I could give out to people, and I all of a sudden had clarity about that. And there's a course that I wanna create that would be a low ticket offering. Immediately I had more. Clarity around that. And so this is the question that I have for you. What is your anchor?

And I've been talking to other people about it and I've definitely had some questions about it. And one was like, what does that mean, ? Like what is your anchor? Do I mean your why? And we've talked about this before, right? Like why having, why having a strong why is important. But this person wanted to know, like, or did, I mean something more tangible than just a why?

And my answer to that is that it's really anything that clarifies what you're doing. So a why could be it. Like I. That could be the thing that keeps you kind of on your path and helps you stay away from distraction. So another example, one time was like when I first started working on my business, my schedule was a big anchor for me, like creating a schedule that felt good for me and that worked with my rhythms and was helping me sort of undo some of the hustley, like fake productivity culture that like I.

Absorbed into my brain and my being. A schedule that I created that had me asking questions about how I really wanted to spend my time was one of the things that anchored me for a while. So that was a little bit more tangible than just like a why, but a why could be it. That wasn't enough for me at that moment, right?

Like I couldn't just think like, why am I doing this work? Like that wasn't enough to help me choose exactly. What products I wanna have out there. Right? It was, it helps me stay focused and committed to doing the work right, to helping people. But it wasn't hel, it wasn't giving me that like, very precise thing that I needed to focus my brain in to say like, I wanna help people.

And it looks like this. Another person said that they, they were anchored by their commitment to having a simple. One-on-one business rather than like scaling it. So they were very clear on like the number of clients that they wanna have and how they wanna approach marketing and building relationships and connections with people, right?

Because if you're committed to having a simple one-on-one business, then that kind of like pushes a lot of things away that you don't need, right? Like if you're not gonna scale. You probably never need to think about running ads. That's just probably a true thing. You can do the whole thing based on building relationships, having a social media following, and honestly, word of mouth and referrals might be a huge part of that business.

Right. If you're, if you're just focused on having a simple, straightforward, no frills, one-on-one business, and you can totally make a lot of money doing that, right? I think oftentimes people start getting pulled away from themselves because they're like, I wanna make more money. How do I grow? I've gotta do all these things.

I've gotta scale, I've gotta add programs. I've gotta increase my offers, right? Over time, cans really sort of start to stress some people out. I've seen this happen, whereas like this person's saying like my anchor is knowing that I wanna have a simple one-to-one business. Right? Can you see how that can be extremely anchoring?

Another person said that their offer is what anchors them, and that's really like their actual work and deliverables that their clients get. So, They might be like consistently like reiterating on their offer and on their curriculum. Um, so just so that they're making sure that they're like delivering at the highest capacity, but for them it's the offer, right?

So the offer itself is the anchoring thing. I noticed how, for me, I was having some trouble. Zeroing in on my offer because I didn't have this other thing kind of giving me a lane to stay in For my friend, her offer is her lane. I would say this other friend, another person said that. Their anchor is building a world based on care and dignity for all beings and for supporting other people in doing that.

And I think that's an amazing thing too, right? That's a why. That is a very anchoring why, and that's going to inform and impact whatever they create in their life, right? And that doesn't even have to necessarily be a business thing. That can just be. An anchor for their life, the way they live. That's what I mean when I talk about having like a set of values that you're kind of holding up all of your, um, choices to and sort of seeing if they're in alignment.

So these are just a few examples of ways that you can. Answer that question of like what your anchor is. And I think it's really important, regardless of what we're talking about, whether it's building a business or whether it's like creating something artistically. Like I think about oftentimes like choreographically, like you can have an anchor within the the choreographic theme, right?

Like that could be the theme. And I think that's what really came up for me because I'm a visual person. I am an artist. I used to pick, um, images. As inspiration for pieces. I remember one time I was like feeling very dry in terms of inspiration for choreography for just class, and I just was like looking through Vogue and I saw this image of like a woman in a white dress, like stepping off a a stone wall.

That gave me like the initial gesture for the phrase of movement. I then created. And so it makes sense to me that like for me, seeing this design theme, it's a vibe, , right? It's a vibe. It's a, it's a feeling, it's a flow, it's a concept. Like I have now been conceptualized as a business and I'm gonna hold everything up now to that concept.

So that's going to be the through line for everything, and I needed to see it. I needed to have that visual representation that kind of jumped out at me and really showed me myself. Essentially. The other side of this is, it's really interesting how we can use language. So when I brought this up in this Facebook, , um, where some of these other replies came from.

Another responder said that she had been working with a coach that used similar language. They were talking about engines versus anchors and engines move you forward and anchors kind of hold you in place. If your anchored and you're dragging the anchor behind you, then you're getting slowed down. And it's so interesting because like for me,

That's not the imagery that I am using. Like for me, I think about an anchor as something that is kind of temporary, right? It's going to like hold me in place for a moment and give me my bearings and give me some stability. Give me a sense of my surroundings, maybe allow me to regroup, right? That's something that's really important to me consistently is replenishing my energy can be a little bit.

Inconsistent. And so having a lot of time built into my schedule where I get to like feed myself, I think this anchoring is one of those things, right? It's like I am anchoring to regroup, to reform so that I can come back again. And I just think that like idea of language, so maybe it's not anchor for you.

Maybe it is. What's your why? Maybe it is your focus, maybe it's your path, maybe it's your lane. Maybe it's what feels aligned? That's a great question. What feels aligned right now? Identifying it, regardless of what you call it, and understanding what its purpose is, which is to ground you in something. For the purpose of then allowing you to set sail right and release yourself into the world is what we're looking for.

So if you have a hard time kind of gathering all of your ideas in, gathering all of your desires, the things you wanna create, if that feels like it's a bit of a struggle for you, then I really recommend that you answer this question for yourself. And you, you help yourself find that anchor and you use it as an organizing principle in your life like I'm doing right now, and yay, it is going to result in some really amazing things that I have coming up.

I'm working on. An intuitive scheduling program that I wanna release you all. I'm working on another offer that I wanna release to the world. We're gonna be designing this new website, so you are all in for a real treat in the next few weeks. And remember, we've got. Six weeks, hit it and quit it coming up.

I've got two spots left for that. So if you're interested in getting started, maybe you wanna help finding your anchor and we can work on that together. Hit me up at Chris at the only chris hale.com and we can talk about getting started on finding your anchor, creating your path, creating an intuitive schedule that works for you, whatever you wanna do.

I got you, boo. I hope you have a great week. Bye.



If you are loving what you're hearing here on, you need a coach, bitch, please subscribe like and share with your friends. And if you want more information on how you can work with me, one on one. Go to theonlychrishale.com where you can find me on Instagram, theonlychrishale.