77: The Solopreneur’s Trap: When Your Worth is Tied to Your Output

Wondering how to stop your business from draining your energy or intruding on your relationships? Working for yourself can be really hard at times. When all your energy flows into your business as you ride the normal ebbs and flows, it can happen that you neglect parts of your life.

In this episode I explore how the relationship you have towards your business affects the other relationships in your life.  I talk about the one thing that often gets missed in talking about entrepreneurship, namely embodiment.  If you’re a solopreneur, coach, healer, creative, or anyone who wears all the hats in your business, and you want to flourish both in your business and your life, this episode is for you.

What You Will Learn in This Episode

• How deeply held beliefs influence our actions and experiences
• Why wellness habits aren't enough for women entrepreneurs
• Integrating your deepest truth into daily actions and expressions

🧲 If you’re doing all the right things in your business but still feeling stuck, overthinking every move, or struggling to create the momentum you know you’re capable of,  I'd love to support you. 

Book a FREE discovery call at tertiariegler.com/book. We’ll explore what’s really keeping you stuck  and whether working together is the right fit.

📌Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.  It does not constitute therapy, medical advice or business coaching.

Transcript

Hey, hey, it is Tertia and you are listening to the Feminine Embodiment Podcast. This is a show where I teach women entrepreneurs practices and tools to get out of your head and into your body so that you can feel more fully alive and magnetic and have the impact that you are here to have with more ease. I hope I'm sounding really good in your ears right now. I finally got my podcasting system set up. My office doesn't have any carpet or soft furnishing in, and that doesn't really make for an ideal sound. So I've played around with a few setups, and I think this is it. So welcome, welcome. I am glad that you are here. This is my intimate radio voice. So in today's episode, I want to talk about having both a successful business and a successful life, something which is so close to my own personal heart. And I know that if you are in business, business, if you work for yourself, 99% of the time, this would've been a theme in your life too. So you want to listen to today's episode if you are a solopreneur, if you are a coach, a healer, a creative, really someone who tends to wear all the hats in your business. So you're doing sales, you're doing marketing, you're doing client work, you're doing accounting, you're doing website management. There's a lot of stuff. We've got a lot of things on our plates. We have health goals, we have business goals. You may have kids that you need to cart around to soccer practice, football here in Austria. You take part in community events. Perhaps you're even the main breadwinner in your family. We really have a lot on our plate. So I just want to normalize straight out the gate to say that working for yourself is hard. It can take up all of your capacity and then the rest of your life suffers. So if you have been experiencing this where your business is tapping the lifeblood out of you, that's a direct translation out of Afrikaans. Is there a saying like that in English? I don't know. But if you feel that you have no more capacity left, your life is suffering and your business gets the best of you, you're going to find today's episode so helpful. And if you want to go further with me, if you feel that this is something that you really need support with, I'm going to leave a link for you in the show notes so that you can book a free feminine embodiment discovery call with me. So if you look at most of the information out there, I did a bit of research preparing for this episode. A lot of the information tells you to put systems in place, to outsource some of the work that you're doing, to bring help on board, to delegate, and While all of these things have value, to me, it all misses a very important ingredient, and that has to do with the inner work. And I'm not simply talking about mindset here, I'm talking about embodiment because as you know, this is my jam. So the relationship that you have with your business is going to impact the relationship with your life. It's unavoidable. You can't get away from it. Now we have deeply held beliefs when it comes to all things in life, right? We have a world map, a worldview in which we perceive and experience life, and these are made up of conditionings. It's made up of the things that we learned growing up from our environment and our caretakers. So it's really these beliefs about what life is and what success looks like, for example, and where we fit into the world and how much we deserve of what is available in the world. And for many of us, we have beliefs that says success demands a lot from you. Being successful is hard. To be successful doesn't come easy. A lot of this comes from this production capitalist mindset that says our worth is directly related to our output. And so the only things that has value are the things that increases output. So if we can't say that that increases my output, then it doesn't have value. I see this manifesting in us as this hustle harder culture, and it's so deeply ingrained in your actions, even if you don't think of yourself as a hustler, like sitting in the kitchen and then your partner comes home and then all of a sudden you look busy, you do something, you pick up your phone and you look like you're working. That's an example of how this hustler mentality, this, my worth is directly related to my output, manifests. I know I used to, at the, in the beginning of my embodiment days, one of the things that I learned about myself is that I felt incredibly guilty if I would go for a walk in the middle of the day when I knew that my husband was stuck in conference calls the whole day. He works in corporate and I appreciate that he has different demands on his time. I have more autonomy as an entrepreneur, but it wasn't about the demands on my time. It was about how How much value does it have to be on conference calls versus how much value does it have when you go for a walk in the middle of the day? And what does that contribute to your output? And this is something that I'm still unraveling in my own body, my relationship towards productivity, my relationship towards success. I think the biggest challenge that we have around these deeply held beliefs is So often our view of success tells us we need to choose to either have a successful business or to have a successful personal life. And more often than not, what happens is if we hold this belief in our bodies, then the actions that we take, the way that we show up, the way that we relate to other people in our lives, it's constantly proving this belief to be true. A second challenge, something that we all face when we have our own businesses, is that You know, if you are your own boss, you don't really have working hours, especially if your work is digital and you're always connected. So what happens is we end up feeling stretched really thin during our workday, especially if we are struggling with maintaining boundaries, and then that work bleeds into our relationships. You can be so busy with launching or with setting up systems in your business that you don't have the capacity to organize your kids' like 5th birthday party. And so you end up sending the invites too late and you have to have the party at home because you couldn't find a venue anywhere. Or you're having date night with your partner and you're so busy solving problems that you're actually struggling to focus on what your partner is saying and sharing with you. And that decreases the intimacy of the two of you being together in each other's company. And then the third thing, which is Something which of course infuses all of my work is that as women, we have unique considerations. And I'm not saying that we are snowflakes, but it's true that as women business owners, there are certain things that impact us considerably. We're living in a hyper-masculine culture that devalues our feminine traits, and we set up our businesses in very linear ways, and it doesn't take into consideration the way that we are built on the inside, the way that We are wired, and this is why to me the answer to being able to having both a successful business and a successful life, so not sacrificing the one for the other, is to bring our bodies into the equation. And here I'm not talking about simply eating well and exercising and taking breaks and getting enough sleep, even though those things are of course, incredibly important because there's enough research that has already shown us over and over again that healthy eating and movement and getting enough sleep improves your energy, it improves your mental clarity, it improves your digestive health, it improves your hormonal balance, but it doesn't automatically change the way in which you respond to stress. So like your stress reactions. It doesn't automatically increase your emotional awareness. It doesn't improve or change or impact how you relate to others, and it doesn't increase your resilience. And this is why you can work out 5 days a week, you can eat clean, you can get 7 hours at night, but you still feel wired at night. You still struggle to switch off and you still struggle to be present. To your life. And so when we bring the body into the equation, and this is what I teach my clients how to do, is we dive in and connect with the internal guidance system. You want to turn up the volume of the internal sensations in your body. And this is what embodiment is all about. We want to lead less with our rational minds and we want to lead more with our body. We are not rejecting the mind. We are not rejecting thinking, but we want to bring the whole of us on board. We want We want to include our thoughts, our feelings, our sensations, our inner knowings. We want to include all of that, give them all equal chance and opportunity and weight. But the thing is that most of us are very well developed in our thinking muscle, right? It's a result of the world that we live in. And when we turn down the volume, the volume of our internal world, And we reduce the sensitivity to our internal world, to our bodies. We do that to the point where we don't have access to the wisdom that lives within us, that is available to us. And then we have these situations where we have external definitions of success, where we have these deeply held beliefs of our worth being connected to our output. Where we feel really stretched thin, we can't access those boundaries. We continuously override ourselves because this is how we've been conditioned. And that's the key here. This is not about something that you are doing wrong or something that you need to improve about yourself or something that you need to fix about yourself. It is this collective soup that we swim in that has trained us to show up and to perform in a certain way. And what is also true is that if you ignore your internal world for long enough, this internal guidance system, two things are definitely going to happen. Number one, you're going to build a business and a life that your nervous system doesn't actually like, right? Which is going to impact your life experience, your life satisfaction, the joy and the pleasure that you experience on the day to day. And number 2, you're going to disconnect from the source of your best decisions. Now, I am sure that you have experienced a situation before where you had a bad feeling about a client or a situation that eventually turned out into a nightmare. You felt uneasy about hiring someone and then it didn't work out, or you had this idea, this thing that didn't really make sense, but it ended up being your best offer, the best decision you've ever made? This is what I'm talking about. Your nervous system is constantly tracking thousands of microsignals. So it's pulling data from your mental body and your physical body, your emotional body and your energy body, those four dimensions. It's pulling information from there all the time. And this is more than just having a gut feel or being intuitive, even though that is part of what it is. This is actual viable data that you can use to make clearer decisions, to have healthier boundaries, and to actualize your life in a way where you are deeply satisfied. When we turn up the volume of the internal sensations in our body, those internal sensations, that is your deepest truth. So you want to go in, you want to find that truth, and you want to connect with it and then let it come out through your body in the way that you hold yourself, in the way that you take action, in the way that you show up in your expression. This is how you actualize your truest self in the world. The same body is the one who runs your company, who walks into your bedroom, who sits at dinner, who holds your child, who negotiates your contracts, and who leads your team. Your body is always going to tell you the truth if you know how to listen for it. And that truth is key to you having the business of your dreams where you can serve and bring your vision and gifts into the world and not neglect your personal life in the process. You can have them both. We want to break away from living in an overly intellectual way where we experiencing life and we making decisions solely on the level of the mind. This is what leads to burnout. This is what leads to us not having capacity to take in the full range of our experiences and our emotions and the fullness of life. And we do that by bringing our bodies on board through dialing up the volume on our internal world. If you would love my help in discovering how to dial up the volume in your internal world, one of the best things for you to do is to head over to my website, tertia regler.com, and sign up for a free feminine embodiment discovery call. In this 30-minute feminine embodiment discovery call, we are going to check in on what is your current relationship to your business and your life. What is your sensitivity levels insofar as your internal world is concerned? I'm going to offer some insights on how you can shift this and what next steps you can take. And then if you want my help to support you in doing that, we can discuss what working together would look like as well. So head on over to my website, www.mariannewirth.com, click on the discovery call link, which you will find in the top menu bar and schedule your free feminine embodiment discovery call. That's it from me for this episode. I appreciate you being here. I hope it fell beautifully on your ears and I will see you in the next episode.