85: 7 Lessons I learned in Growing My Spiritual Business

Growing a spiritual business is about more than finding the right strategy, offer, funnel, or content plan. At some point, your business will bring you face to face with your fears, your boundaries, your visibility wounds, your perfectionism, and the parts of yourself you are trying to hide from the world.

If you’ve ever struggled to treat your business like a real business, compared your output to someone in a completely different season of life, overcomplicated your funnels, or wondered why your beautiful spiritual messaging is not converting, this episode will show you what might be going on.

In this episode, Tertia shares seven lessons she has learned while building her spiritual business, from creating better boundaries with work, embracing the natural seasons of business, using simple systems and automations, doing your own inner work before sharing publicly, and making your messaging more tangible so your clients understand the real results of working with you.

Key Points:

• Why treating your spiritual business like a business changes the energy you bring to it
• How clear start-and-stop rituals can help you focus, switch off, and create better boundaries
• Why your business cannot always operate in constant summer energy
• How working with your current life season can protect your nervous system from burnout
• Why simple systems, content tracking, and email automation can free up creative capacity
• The difference between sharing vulnerably and sharing from an unprocessed wound
• Why tangible messaging matters if you want people to understand and buy your offers

Links and Resources mentioned:
Lead Magnet: https://tertiariegler.com/embodied-expansion-practice/
Beta Program in June: https://tertiariegler.com/work-with-tertia/

Keywords: spiritual business, spiritual women in business, feminine embodiment business, nervous system and business, growing a spiritual business, CEO energy, spiritual entrepreneurship, visibility wounds, business boundaries, messaging for spiritual entrepreneurs

🔥Get this free somatic audio + worksheet to untangle your business challenges so you can take clear next steps with ease ▶️ https://tertiariegler.com/embodied-expansion-practice/

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

Transcript

Growing a business is a spiritual journey, and it doesn't matter if you are a coach or a healer or if you work with clients intuitively or whether your business is more product-based. There's going to come a point where you will negotiate with yourself, where you will have to face your fears and overcome them, and you'll have to learn how to put boundaries in place, and that's boundaries with other people but also boundaries with yourself. Your business is going to grow you in ways that you would never imagine, and we learn so much on this journey, and so in today's episode I'm going to share with you what I've learned in building my spiritual business, and by the end of this episode hopefully there will be some tips that you can implement already today in your business.

Welcome to today's episode. My name is Tertia, and this is the Feminine Embodiment Podcast for Women Entrepreneurs. It's a show where I teach spiritual business owners how to grow their business by stepping into their CEO energy. So my business has gone through many iterations from back when I started at the age of 30. I left my job in corporate, and that's when I went out on my own.

Even though I've gone through these iterations, there are a few things that have stayed constant and things that I have learned. So the very first thing that I have learned is that you should treat your business like a business and not like a hobby, and I think often when we are just starting out in our spiritual businesses or when we don't have many clients yet or even when we're not really making money, we're not really showing any profit despite the work that we put in, it's very easy to not think of our businesses as a real entity, as something to be taken seriously, and yet people take our businesses as serious as what we do because it's the whole conviction, it's the whole energy that you carry within yourself. And if you don't have this conviction in your own energy, in your own being of the seriousness of your business, even though of course you're allowed to have fun in your business, but if you don't carry that conviction within yourself and you don't treat your business as a business, then what's going to happen is it's going to be so easy for you to get distracted by things in your life. You're going to get distracted by things in your personal life, you're going to get distracted, especially if you're working from home, by things that need to be done around the home. You're going to find yourself folding the laundry or doing the dishes in the time that you are actually supposed to be working on your business. And so what I have found helps tremendously for me, and these are like habits that I've cultivated over the years, is to have a clear defined stop and start to my work day.

This is what helps me to actually get into work mode and then also to, at the end of my work day, be able to switch off, because I think it happens so often to us that you might walk out of your office or you might close your laptop, but even then, if you go to your family, if you go spend the evening with your friends, there's still a part of you that's always thinking about work. If you're lying in bed, there's a part of you that's thinking about work. It's important for us, I think, to have that internal resourcing that we can actually separate ourselves from our work, and it's very difficult, especially if our business, if we are spiritual entrepreneurs, because then our businesses are so often, and it's like an extension of our purpose, isn't it? So that's why it's so important to have these clear stops and start, and you can, for example, start your day by lighting a candle, and this is symbolically the start of your work day, or you can do like I do a movement practise or light some essential oils or some incense to show the start of your work day, and this is just really a little trigger that you're training your subconscious mind with to say that right, we are now in work mode, we are focussing here now, and we are not going to get distracted. And then at the end of the day you leave your work behind, and that can look like actually physically not just closing your laptop but shutting it down, closing the door to your office, maybe changing your clothes, and again you're sending that message to your subconscious mind that this is now the end of the work day.

The second lesson that I have learned, and this came as a result of the feminine embodiment work that I've been doing, is to embrace all of your seasons. This is part of how I bring the feminine into my business, and if we just look at mother nature, we can clearly see how the feminine is expressed through all of the different seasons, right? So we have our growth seasons of summer, and then we have the dormant season of winter, and yet our businesses so often run on a very summer-like energy. So this means that there's always linear growth, there's always output, there's always things getting ripe and ready to be plicked, to be plucked, and we cannot really operate like that. It's not sustainable for us as women because we are also cyclical beings in our nature, but not only that, you are always going through different seasons in your life.

If I look back, for example, at my own life, when I started working more online, I had a very small young family. I had two children that were both toddlers, and they were very reliant on me, which really reduced the number of hours that I had available to work. But before I had kids, I was running training days that were stretching over four days. I would work late into the night with projects. I would be on site at six o'clock in the morning, and I would leave 10 o'clock at night, and I could sustain that because I could take two days off afterwards and maybe relax and not do anything. And then, of course, when you have children, you can't just take off for two days because they are little ones that are reliant on you.

When I did, and this was before I really knew about how important it is to allow the seasons of our life to influence the way or to be considered into the way in which we run our businesses, is when I had children and I then started working online, I took that same work ethic that I had before I had any kids, and I was trying to do the same output, but of course in much limited hours, and the result of that was because of the stress that I was putting on myself, my nervous system fried out. I was dealing with a lot of personal unresolved grief at the time, and I burnt out. And when I then started unravelling this conditioning in my body and I discovered that there is another way to do this, now I could see how when we work with the natural ebbs and flows that happen in our business and we work with our natural ebbs and flows of our own energy, it completely changes the relationship, how you relate to where you are in your business.

And this is especially important because so often I think we compare ourselves to other entrepreneurs, other business owners that we see out there, and we find ourselves lacking in some way.

I always say you cannot compare oranges to apples, you've got to compare apples to apples, so the season of life that you are in might be completely different, and therefore you cannot have the same results, you cannot have the same output. When we take the season that we are in into consideration, what that does is when you are in a winter season, which means that your energy is lower, which means that this is a season where you're pulling back, you're not really out there as much as you would be, for example, in a summer season. When you embrace that part of you being in winter, you do so with love and consideration and acceptance and no judgement, which means that you are more resourced while you are in the winter season versus when you are fighting against it and you're trying to make it not so. You are actually just depleting yourself. It's not a sustainable way of being. So that's the second thing that I learned in building my spiritual business.

I know it's quite tempting to want to do everything yourself if you don't make a lot of income in your business yet, but that is holding you back. At the very least, there's two things that you need to have in place. You need to have some sort of system in place where you keep all of these ideas in your head, and that can be an excel spreadsheet. You don't need to go fancier than that. And even if you do get a VA in that's going to work for you like a couple of hours every week, you can give her shared access or them shared access to this spreadsheet.

And in this, you can have different spreadsheets for different kinds of things. So you need maybe a spreadsheet for all of the metrics. If you have your CEO meeting once a month with yourself, then you can track your metrics in your business to see how you're doing, because remember this is a business, it's not a hobby. Number two is to have the content that you're creating. If you're doing long form content, which I highly recommend you do, keep track of the content that you do so that you can repurpose it, so you don't have to go and reinvent the wheel every time and think up new things every time, but you're building like a library for yourself, a content database.

And then some other things that can also be captured are, of course, your maybe business ideas. Instead of running around with all of these thousands of business ideas in our heads, is to have a place to capture it all so that you can get it out of your head and make some space for your creative impulses and the things that you need to focus on now, to have capacity for that instead of just thinking about all of these other things that you would like to do. So that's a system that you can put in place.

And automation that you definitely have to have in place, I believe, is for your email newsletter. Now, if you don't have an email list, this is something that you are going to have to invest in or start up, and I'll tell you why. Your email list belongs to you. The followers on social media, the lovely interactions that we have there with our community, they don't really belong to us, not that anybody belongs to us, but if something happens to one of the social media platforms, then your whole following, all the content that you've created, all of that is wiped out, it is gone. And so when you have a newsletter, those subscribers are yours. They want to be in your world, they want to be part of your community.

And of course, when you have a newsletter, then you will write to them once a week or whatever consistency it is that you decide on, I would imagine. So the automation that you need for that is at least a welcome sequence. So when people join your email list, let them be welcomed in your world. And I'm not talking here about these 36 emails where you're trying to sell something to them from the first moment they lay eyes on you, although if that's what you want to do then feel free, but I personally, I'm not very fond of those type of letters. But I do believe that there's so much value in when you're joining someone's community, you're joining their newsletter, that you get a very short welcome sequence, maybe teach them a little bit about yourself, teach them a little bit about your offers, and also show them how you can support them, what it is that you can help them with.

Now, an experiment that I've been going through in my business quite recently, and I'm still waiting to see the final results, is I used to have many lead magnets in the past and they've always worked very well for me, and then most recently I decided, I've seen some other people in the industry do it, so I've decided I'm not going to have a lead magnet anymore, I'm going to can all my lead magnets and I'm just going to have a newsletter. So you subscribe to my newsletter and this way if you want to hear from me you'll get on my newsletter, but that didn't work so well for me.

And when I was like reviewing this and trying to find out where I went wrong, I realised most probably I very recently shifted into this new niche of entrepreneurship, where before I would speak to women in general, women who were spiritual, who were sensitive, who were interested in expanding in their own lives, but it wasn't specifically focused on business. We're now speaking to the same woman, but those in the group who have businesses and one who want to go into that next level using their business as the vehicle. And so this is a new audience for me, which means that I need to work on gaining the trust of this audience, and I believe that is why my just my newsletter sign ups weren't as successful.

And so I now have a lead magnet back in place. It's a somatic tool that takes you from whatever doubt you might be experiencing in a business challenge, and once you do the somatic practise, you come away with some clarity on your next steps. I'm going to link that for you in the show notes if you want to take a squiz at that.

The fourth thing that I've learned is to simplify. Now, what I did at the very start of going online is I'm a ferocious learner and I try to find out as much as I can about online business and how things work, and what I ended up doing is I ended up over-optimising for the business that I had. So I was putting very complicated funnels in place, and I had all these tripwires in place, and I had all of these incredibly marketing orientated tools in place, but my business wasn't yet ready for it, and when I look back at that I wish I had simplified sooner.

I used to have all of these different offers, and I was spending so much time trying to sell these offers. I was in launch mode all of the time, and I actually, I didn't enjoy it. However, what I did learn in this time was I worked deeply, and here comes the spiritual journey in again of when we have our own businesses, is I had to face up to my own visibility wounds, all the ways in which I felt completely and wildly unsafe to be seen and to be received by others. So that is the good thing that came from that, but I still stand by, I think simpler is better.

And so, for example, right now I have a super, super simple funnel. What I have is I have my podcast, it goes to my lead magnet about which I spoke earlier, and then from my lead magnet you are now part of my world, and I regularly, once a week, I send out a high value email. So I don't just send out a promotional email to say, oh I have a podcast released or there's a new video released on youtube. What my newsletters contain are valuable, usable, practical information that changes either the relationship that you have towards your goals, to your business, or it changes the internal dynamics, and it gives you some food for thought to affect and impact how you show up in your business.

And then from my newsletter I have one single signature offer, it's my group programme, and I'm actually running a beta round in June because it's the first time that I'm running this programme, and it really is for that woman who is ready to step into her CEO energy. So I'll tell you a little bit more about this at the end of the episode, but the beta is happening in June and it is for four weeks.

So the next thing that I learned in my business is to do your own inner work first and to not share from the wound. So what do I mean by this? So often when we maybe have a big transformational experience or when we come across a healing modality or something that has really changed our lives, the tendency is often there to go and share as quickly as possible about this online. And the problem with that is when we share while we are messily in the process of something, it doesn't matter what it is, but when we are sharing while we're in the process, you haven't really metabolised or integrated the learning of that.

And so a lot of times it might feel, and if you think of some of the people that you might have seen on social media or maybe even some videos that you've seen or podcast episodes that you've listened to where someone was sharing from their pain, they were sitting in the middle of the experience, in the discomfort, and sharing from that place, what I see happen in such an instance is when we do that, most often we're sharing as a way for us to feel better and it's not really in service to our clients.

I also think that it is a very fine line that we need to walk because, you know, we want to be vulnerable, we want to share vulnerably with our audience. What I see happen when we consistently share from our own wounds is we start to attract more of those types of clients into our world, and this might not be the ideal fit client that you want to work with. So if you find yourself calling in clients that aren't really the clients you would deeply love to work with, then it might be beneficial for you to go and see the kinds of things that you are sharing, the way in which you express, and what it is that you're talking about. Does that come from your wounds or does this come from a place that's already been metabolised and a place that's already been integrated? So something for you to think about.

Lesson number six that I learned in growing my spiritual business is to embrace who I am completely. This is part of the visibility wound and the witch wound healing that I've done throughout my journey, but I think it is really something that we all can afford to spend some time on. Begin to dismantle these masks that we hide behind for whatever reason and the different roles that we contort ourselves into because we want to belong or because we don't want to be rejected or we want to look as if we are doing it right.

One of the things that I used to bump up a lot was perfectionism, and I was so afraid of being found that I wasn't doing something right or that I wasn't good enough that I would, at the very beginning of my online business journey when I started doing youtube videos and I started recording podcast episodes, I would spend so much time trying to make sure that it was absolutely perfect, and I would re-record over and over and over again to make sure that everything was just perfect, and it was exhausting.

And it really has been a journey for me to unravel that in my nervous system as well and to go and find the parts of me that I have tucked away and bring them to be like, so that I can inhabit them as well, so that I can be the full spectrum of who I am. And this is what I support my clients with because I believe that if we are tucking pieces of ourselves away because we think that we're not good enough or there's something shameful about that part of ourselves or there's something that we need to fix about ourselves, when we tuck those parts of ourselves away, you are essentially holding pieces of who you are back.

And when we have engagement and interaction with other people, that complete resonance cannot happen, and they might not know exactly what's feeling off, but it's going to be on an unconscious level. Our nervous systems are always communicating with each other, our subconscious mind is always picking up information from our field, somewhere there's going to be a disconnect.

And when we speak about being authentic, it doesn't mean about being loud or, you know, climbing out of the box or doing things like that. It means inhabiting your full self, allowing your light and your dark and your shadows and your brilliance to coexist, and to fully let all of who you are come to the party. Let all of who you are speak on the podcast episode or record a video or write a blog post or create a reel.

And this is how we begin to heal our visibility wounds because if we have a fear of being seen, it usually has to do with our nervous system protecting us and keeping us safe, and you cannot change that on the level of the mind. That's something that happens on the level of the body. So for you to be fully received by your clients so that your business can grow, we need to fully inhabit ourselves, we need to fully allow ourselves to be who we are and express from that point.

And then the very final lesson that I've learned in my spiritual business, lesson number seven I think it is that we are on now, has to do with messaging. And this is also something that I think we get tripped up a lot in our spiritual businesses, is we use these beautiful spiritual words and expressions and it doesn't really mean much to anyone except us and other people in the spiritual community that does the same work than what we do.

It has been a challenging journey to find a way to be more tangible in the outcomes that I'm offering my clients in the services that I offer so that I can really in the 3d world name what is going to be different, and I think it's a dance for us, especially because so many of the things that we do, it's quite nebulous, isn't it? There's a lot of poetry and a lot of depth in how we sometimes explain these things, and it can feel quite mundane if we try and translate it to the 3d world.

But this is what I've learned, the secret to being able to convert your clients, they need to know exactly, tangibly, what it is that they are going to get. And as I said, for me this is still an exploration. So again, if you're finding that you're putting out all of these beautiful offers and nobody's buying, nobody's biting, nobody's responding, and here you can go and have a look, could it be that the transformation that you promise, the thing that's going to lie on the other side after they have worked with you, it is not really so clear? They don't really know. It's something that might sound good and it could make them feel good, but people don't buy feelings, they buy results. They want to see a tangible difference.

And so speaking of messaging, I've been practising my messaging for my beta that's coming up in June, and as I said earlier, this is the first time that I'm running this programme. So it's going to be four weeks, and in four weeks you are going to stop going backwards and forwards in your decisions, you're going to know what to focus on when you sit down to work, and you are going to be able to follow through consistently, that's what you're going to learn.

And it's happening on zoom, which means it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can join us from the comfort of your own home. I'm going to put a link for you in the show notes so that you can get more information on that.

I truly hope that these seven things that I've learned, that I've shared with you today, that there was something in there that triggered like a little bell and that you can go and implement and change in your business or in the relationship that you have towards your business or your clients already right now.

Thank you so much for joining me, and as always I deeply appreciate you. Remember to grab those downloads and those links in the show notes, and I'll speak to you next time. Bye.