019: Living Softly: A New Way to Hold Work, Business, and Creativity

What if the opposite of hard isn’t easy—but soft? In this episode, we talk about what it looks like to live and work softly in a world that constantly tells us business, selling, and creativity have to be hard. 

Not soft as in vague or wobbly - but soft as in grounded, steady, and kind to ourselves while we do meaningful work. This is a conversation about pressure, language, and the quiet ways we make things harder than they need to be.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why hard work comes naturally to us - and how “soft” offers a better way to the same goal
• How pressure and self-criticism sneak into our work without us noticing
• Simple language shifts that help interrupt shame spirals
• What it looks like to hold work, selling, and creativity with care instead of force
• Why approaching ideas (like writing a book) with curiosity can open doors instead of shutting us down

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• This Week's Free Action Guide: Soft, Not Smaller: A Language & Pressure Reset
• The Smart Soulful Business Facebook Community: www.smartbusiness.thrivecart.com/soulful-strategy-community

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MORE FROM BECKY & LAURIE

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Smart Soulful Business Facebook Community: smartbusiness.thrivecart.com/soulful-strategy-community

Transcript

Becky Brown  0:01 
If you're a Christian woman, building a business and want it to be purposeful and profitable, we've got you covered. I'm Becky

Laurie Graham  0:08 
And I'm Laurie. We have both built successful businesses that we love without losing our faith, humor or our sanity. This is Smart Soulful Business.

Becky Brown  0:17 
Real conversations to help your business fit your life and not the other way around.

Laurie Graham  0:26 
Hey, hey, welcome back to the Smart Soulful Business podcast with Becky and Laurie.

Becky Brown  0:32 
Together, we help Christian women build businesses that are soulful, strategic and successful without losing themselves along the way.

Laurie Graham  0:40 
And we are coming in chuckling a little bit today, because this is not the episode we planned, and we're so excited to be doing life with you, like wherever you're at right now, whether you're walking on a treadmill or driving to work or doing your dishes, or at work.

Becky Brown  0:56 
Cleaning your house, yes, oh my gosh, I need to do that.

Laurie Graham  0:59 
But wherever you're coming from. We're really happy to be living our life alongside with you. And so I'm going to share how I got interrupted today, and how Becky joined me in the interruption, and how we are bringing this to you, not as an interruption, but how would you voice that Becky, like as a.

Becky Brown  1:18 
I mean, interruption, it's a positive thing. It's an addition. It's like a bonus feature that we're adding.

Laurie Graham  1:23 
Yeah, because I know you talk a lot about interruptions, Becky like that, oftentimes they are God-led or invitations, or maybe opportunities.

Becky Brown  1:32 
Yeah? Opportunities, Yep.

Laurie Graham  1:35 
Yeah, you're getting an unplanned, a little off the cuff, little bit planned, a little bit intentional episode today that we hope will change your life like I believe it's going to be changing mine, and already has this morning. So anyway, this morning, I heard a song called Soft Life Season. Soft Life Season, and it basically just completely stopped me, and as I do oftentimes, when I find songs like these that like, catch me in my tracks, I forward it to Becky. And then she texted me back and said, Oh my gosh. You know, I don't remember exactly what you said, but she's like, this is so good. And then when we got on our earbuds for our morning walk, which we often do, me in Tucson, and Becky in Texas,

Laurie Graham  2:22 
it became part of our conversation, and Becky, as we were talking just initially. Do you remember your first feelings or first thoughts or kind of what, where our conversation went, that you were like, Oh, this is so good.

Becky Brown  2:37 
Oh, goodness. Well, when you sent me this song, I mean, you had a hard day yesterday, and so when you sent me the song called Soft Life Season, and the words that she was using to describe the softness, the gentleness, the tenderness of approaching her day, not ignoring life or saying it's all easy, But just the approach, the posture that she was taking, I was like, Oh, this is the day you need. You need a soft life day today. And so that's what made it feel so important, is Oh, yesterday was not soft. Today should be your soft landing. So some of my really good friends, my friend Katie, you and I will use the words like, having a really good friend gives you a soft place to land. And that, like the soft place this is, you needed a soft place to land today. So that's what makes this such an important conversation for us to share with you, and we want to share it with you, that's it's important enough to add to this podcast series to change our plans last minute, which, by the way, is not easy for your planner person here, right here, who loves plans and predictability and knowing what's coming and preparing for it. But this is important, and so bear with us as we just share with you what's on our hearts today, and we hope it's important for you too.

Laurie Graham  4:07 
Yeah, and I want to also just mention, as we dive in, that this is completely 100% about business, like this is about your business, your dreams. This is about my business. It's also about life. But when Becky and I started Smart Soulful Business, like smart and soulful go together, and I think that's what I'm so excited about, this living softly piece, because we're going to talk about how it's smart and leads to success and leads to life, purpose and joy in so many ways. And basically this is how I want to live. I don't want to live my day yesterday again. It was hard. I spiraled a bit, I cried a bit, I felt defeated. I felt like quitting. I had a lot of hard things happen yesterday on a lot of different levels. And man, I want to live like this. Now, before I ask you a first question, Becky, I kind of want to reframe one thing, because this is what hit me this morning was, I talk about doing hard things the easy way, like I learned that from Bill Galtier in Soul Shepherding, he talked about the easy yoke of Jesus, and it's a phrase that he used to our group that was, you know, being taught by Him, but I've adopted it because I think doing hard things the easy way, like, that's pretty beautiful, like when we think about the yoke of Jesus, like, it's hard work, and, you know, Jesus says, you know stuff about being easy, and we all know life isn't easy. You know, we all know stuff is hard sometimes. So doing hard things the easy way. But what struck me when I listened to this song was, what if easy wasn't the opposite of hard? Like, we think it's hard or it's easy, like life is hard, we can do hard things. Like, think about that meme and that phrase. How often have we heard this? You can do hard things, okay, what if the opposite of hard wasn't easy, but it was soft? Like it doesn't have to be hard. It could be soft, like we could still do the work, but we could do it softly, like there was something about that, like when I think, like when life gets heavy or life gets hard, a lot of times we think we have two options. We can do it hard and push through and, you know, suck it all in and do all our effort, or we can make it easy. We can do it harder. We can make it easy. Make it easy, to me, is always such a compromise, because it means I am getting rid of half the things I wanted to do, right? You know, yes, like, if you make it easy, how do we make this easier? Well, I didn't really promise that. I don't really have to do that email, but what if we just made the same thing softer?

Laurie Graham  6:42 
You know, like, why does easy? So first off, let's go here. Why does easy sometimes feel unrealistic or irresponsible, Becky, in your personal life, like when you think about because you do a lot of hard things. You've got littles, you do ASL interpretation, you do a lot of stuff at church. You run several streams of income, revenue-building income. You have family and friends, great relationships, travel plans. So why does easy sometimes feel unrealistic or even impossible? Let's talk about this first.

Becky Brown  7:16 
Yeah, and unrealistic and impossible sounds right because there's all these, these things mixed together here. There's the practical needs of my two little boys in my life. There's the the practical needs of, okay, the reality is, we need my income to support our family, so I can't just put, shove work off my plate. There's the actual needs in front of me and there is also this calling piece from the Lord. You and I talk about this all the time, where, when we get to the place, and you and I don't use the word 'calling' very often, we don't.

Laurie Graham  7:49 
I bristle at the word 'calling'. I don't like the word 'calling'.

Becky Brown  7:53 
Yeah, and I don't blame you, because I think it can be used, way overused, I think. But when you and I get to that point, because we'll kind of feel like, maybe I should do this, maybe I shouldn't do this. But when we get to the point which, you know, I came to this point when we were deciding whether to live in Colorado or live in Texas, and it got to the point where I felt like I can't not choose this, and that's where my boundary is for using the word 'calling'. So I feel that about certain things in my business. This year, I feel called to write devotionals where it's like, I can't even not do this. And so it feels impossible when I'm like, Okay, well, my real life involves these two little boys, and it does involve travel plans, and we have a family, and I am involved in ministry at church. And yes, there are some choices there, but it's like, how many things can we feel 'called to' to get to the point of, well, I can't not do this. How, like and easy? What does that even look like?

Laurie Graham  8:54 
Because that enters your life. Then how would my life be easy if I have all these things that are there? And I also think for me, that word 'easy' sometimes feels incredibly irresponsible.

Becky Brown  9:07 
Yes, yeah, talk a little bit more about that, what, what feels irresponsible? Because you and I have talked about that, where sometimes in our work, we do something and it's like way faster than we thought, or way easier than we thought, or way more smooth than we thought. And we're like, Wait, did I do it? Right? And it comes with self-doubt, right?

Laurie Graham  9:27 
Yeah, you know, I think too, when you just said that, like, Why does easy feel irresponsible to me? The first thing that went which is a little bit of some dysfunction, I'm about to share some dysfunction that went through my head, is, nothing should be easy. Like, life shouldn't be easy for me, it's hard for so many people, it shouldn't be easy, and sometimes I even feel like when it's easy, I'm doing it wrong, like it shouldn't have been that easy, right? But I want to talk about soft being it's just a different way of carrying things. And we're going to get super practical and talk about what this means to live softly. But if, if I can kind of, before we go into hard mode, like, let's just a little picture of living softer would be waking up and for me, knowing that the timing is fine, like, wherever I'm at today, God's got it, like, this is where I'm supposed to be.

Laurie Graham  10:18 
That the timing when things feel off. I don't have to panic, you know, like to me living softly as I listened to that song and other songs by her, because this morning, I went on a rabbit trail of this soft life. What would that be like? I think I would still be just as productive, but I would be.

Becky Brown  10:38 
Experiencing it super differently.

Laurie Graham  10:40 
Such a different way, like with more peace and more acceptance, but, but not without the creativity, or even without the success. The image that went through my mind was, you know, a big traffic jam or traffic on the road. I hate driving in traffic, and, you know, people kind of yelling at each other through the windows and pushing and slowdowns and start-ups and turns and all this kind of stuff. And what I was thinking about was, like me being in a hovercraft, above it, you know, just going above it, like watching with perspective and still getting to the destination, but landing softer, like without all the drama or the panic. Does that make sense?

Becky Brown  11:17 
Yes, and I am going to take the second like I did in our conversation this morning to tie this to my six-plus year journey with insomnia, because this hits home for me, because for six years it felt so hard. It felt so hard. You can read my whole journey on soveryblessed.com if you search 'insomnia', there's a post that tells you the whole story, if you want to catch up. But I basically got to a point last year, and I'm going to call it 'the acceptance stage of grief', where I reached openhanded living and I was like, okay, so this insomnia is built into my life, and I can't control it. I've tried, I've done all the research, I've done all the things, I've tried all the treatments, and here I am going to experience insomnia differently, and I might not sleep tonight. I might sleep 20 minutes tonight, and I might get an hour, and it might like it might feel really uncomfortable, and I can still keep the calm piece, that hovercraft, okay, like that's what's going to happen. And your question that enters my head is, how can I best care for myself today in this situation? So yeah, let's, so we've talked a little bit about soft mode. Let's, let's veer into hard mode a little bit, and let's talk about what that looks like. So hard mode doesn't just mean that we work hard. That's kind of what we were talking about before we wanted to distinguish the two. It means that we work with all of this pressure, with this posture of power through, of do the thing, of we have to, like, shove our feelings aside and focus on these things, to do things and pressure. It makes us when we work in that kind of posture, when we live in that kind of posture, it makes us spin out. It makes us procrastinate. It makes us shove our emotions aside and stuff things that shouldn't be stuffed. It makes us push through in a way that costs us more than it should. And it's not that we're lazy, it's that we are so overloaded here. So how, how can we tell the difference between these things, working hard and functioning in the hard power through kind of place. What is that? How can we, what are even the warning signs that tells us we're drifting into dangerous territory there?

Laurie Graham  13:30 
Okay, I love what everything you just said when you talked about like hard mode, because I think that is the default for me and many people. Many people who listen to us and send us messages, and even in the community like it's almost like we have been taught to overfunction and when, when we reach anything, an interruption, something's not going like we thought. You know, the sales aren't coming in, a procrastination, a fear. When we reach any of that. It's like the default is to go into work harder. Yeah, and I've been learning a lot about this over the past couple years, but I used to think that was like a superpower of mine.

Becky Brown  14:18 
You have, you've talked about it like that before.

Laurie Graham  14:21 
I could push through. I could get this done. I can work when it feels like I shouldn't be able to get it done, or I've procrastinated long enough that, you know, like one night shouldn't be enough to do this thing I should have done for three weeks, but I still get it done. And I'm going to tell you it cost me. It costs me a lot of peace, but like, I think for a lot of us, that becomes the default, but the fear for me, is that if I go into soft mode or self-care mode, that I am not going to get it done. And I think what I'm learning is it's totally not true, that when I pay more attention to Holy Spirit nudges to myself, to my emotions, I actually accomplish things better and more, like that little hovercraft, like I still get to the end, and it's even a better product, because when I do things softer, like it, I don't know, I just think the results are more maybe have more integrity with who I am, yeah, then looking like something else that looks like it was supposed to be, but you asked, like, how do we? Did you ask? I went off and another, I don't know, I think you asked me how I knew, like, what the warning signs were. So for me, I can feel anxiety in my body almost immediately, like it and even in my brain, I start to get a little unclear, like my thoughts get jumbled, or I have those feelings like I'm doing too much, or, and I start to kind of change those thoughts, right, like I'm doing too much. No, don't say that, because I know that's a bad thing to say to myself, and that's going to send me, you know, but this thought of living differently, you know, panic feels really urgent, and to stop myself from panicking, which I know how now I've learned those tools, right? I know how to regulate, but sometimes it feels irresponsible, because then I'm not going to get my work done. Does that make sense?

Becky Brown  16:14 
And let's lean into that for a second, because I have a pretty clear mental picture of what you're describing here, because I get there so often, so I have almost this cartoon in my head, right of this, this cartoon sitting with like, 20 screens up, and his hands are just flying so fast that you can't even see that their hands anymore on all these different, so he's busy, right? But not productive, not focused, not prioritized. So he's not, he's not creating quality work and doing the things that most need to be done, even though he's doing a lot, and I see that in myself a lot. When I function out of fear, when I function out of panic, I don't have clarity, and I'm just like, I've got I'm just so freaked out that I've got to do something to fill to keep my hands busy. I've just got to do and produce. And even though it's not even aligned with my goals or priorities in my business, right?

Laurie Graham  17:05 
Yeah, and I also say, like, you produce a lot, Becky. You can do a lot in hard mode, like in spinning mode, in, both of us can like, and I know that every woman listening right now, or they wouldn't be listening to us, like we know how to get it done. But I just want to say, when we're in that mode, like I'm picturing the hands flying on the keyboard, like you just talked about, it creates a lot of noise, like the extra noise, like the traffic jam below me, they're still going to get to the same place, but there's so much stress and pressure and noise,

Laurie Graham  17:40 
but so this is where we're gonna get into practical, challenging. What does

Laurie Graham  17:45 
this really look like like? What are we talking about? Because if we're not talking about necessarily doing less, what does living softly look like? What like? What can it look like? And I think you and I can talk about it because we have moments and times and phases and maybe seasons where it has been softer, but I don't want anybody to miss that soft isn't smaller, like we're not talking about getting wussy or, you know, letting go of your goals or being I don't know, I'm picturing this soft, mushy ball that just gets pushed in every direction. That's not what we're talking about. Like, soft isn't smaller. Soft doesn't mean we stop doing the difficult things or the brave things or the responsible things. It means we stop doing them, with can I say internal violence? It's almost like we're being violent against ourselves the way we talk, the way we behave toward ourselves, right? Soft is when we keep moving, but we stop that grinding and the pushing, and I like the word violence here, the

Laurie Graham  19:01 
violence against ourselves, right?

Becky Brown  19:04 
I'm kind of laughing, because at the beginning of 2025, I came to Laurie, and I was like, I just feel like, this is my year to be slime. This is my year to be.

Laurie Graham  19:15 
And I hated it. It made me mad.

Becky Brown  19:17 
It did. And so in my mind, I had been so hard and like I had been trying to grasp control so desperately. My like, I can't, you can't see right now, but my like, my fists were holding clinging so tightly to the tiny bits of control I could have in my life that I was exhausted from holding onto it all. And I was like, I'm letting go. I am becoming slime. Whatever comes my way, I'm just gonna take it, take the hits, mold around it, and you hated it.

Laurie Graham  19:50 
I tried to talk you out of it, and I'm like, slime to me, like, why would you ever want to be slime? And I think you and I both got to the place where we're like, Well, if it was a sparkly slime. It was like pink with glitter in it or something. Maybe it'd be, yeah, that's really funny.

Becky Brown  20:04 
But what I'm gonna say is, I think throughout the year, I learned that slime was a little too far on the spectrum, right? It is what I needed in that moment, but I swung too far, and I think you did talk me back to more of a balance in that place, because I shouldn't just be completely malleable to whatever's happening around me. Like you said, you can still be soft and still hold your shape, right? Slime doesn't hold its shape, but what you're describing here holds its shape.

Laurie Graham  20:32 
So I think you have exampled this past year to me, living softly in a really different way, because you have been much less pressure. I don't know if you've noticed this, but you yourself have been much less pressure. You've let go of things, but you are still, like, setting goals moving forward. You just published an amazing Bible study, by the way, everybody like, I mean, and it is so good and deep and, like, I love it, and so you still did all this work. So if I asked you this question, how would you answer this? What's the difference? Because I think you're very disciplined. I think you're good at being disciplined. You're much more disciplined than I am. To me, discipline means pressure and restriction, like it's very difficult for me because of many things. But anyway, what to you, what's the difference between being disciplined and pressured?

Becky Brown  21:19 
Man, that's such a good question.

Laurie Graham  21:21 
So that's why we're removing right? We're trying to say that pressure, that heaviness, that hardness, we can still be disciplined and be soft. So what is the difference between disciplined and pressured?

Becky Brown  21:30 
Gosh, that's such a good question, and I'm going to try to answer it from a lot of different angles, like my first thought that pops into my mind with the word 'discipline' is actually my Christian Weight Loss journey, which started out with pressure and became positive discipline. Like, I love my healthy habits now. I love my walk. I love my morning quiet times and strength training sessions and like, I love those things that I built, but when I started them, I was, I don't know, doing it because I felt pressure, outside pressure, like, this is, this is the 'should'. This is what it should look like. This is what you should be doing to be a good skinny person, to be a good healthy person to and I'm saying that for our businesses too. Like, this is what a 'successful' business person should look like. That feels like pressure. That feels like I sit at my keyboard and I do what everybody else is doing, and I'm frantic and I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses and like, that's what pressured feels like to me, where discipline is okay. It's my job to sit down and like, think about what are the important things here, and to like, prayerfully consider what are my wisest, most influential, next best steps here, that and sticking with the plan, following through what we know is like our next best steps, that is discipline. It's like we decide it versus somebody else deciding our steps, and that feels really good to me to follow through on my word to myself, follow through and honor my priorities.

Laurie Graham  22:59 
Yeah. You know, as we do Smart Soulful Business, and we're starting to create our next course everybody, on How To Write Your First Book this year, as we continue with the podcast, I think this is this. This is not the end of this conversation. Like we want to learn better and we want to help everyone listening to live life softer, with less harshness, and still be wildly, crazy successful. Yeah. Like, what do you think it would look like to keep the goal but soften the approach? And I kind of don't just mean for you and me individually, but like, teaching this. We're the only ones teaching this in the way that I believe we're teaching business to Christian women that, we are not going to you know, it's so funny, in Small Church Ministry, I always say we don't want to look like the big churches. It's not. We're different. We're unique on purpose and beautiful and really influential and impactful. But we got to quit trying to copy the big church, right? So for us in business, we don't want to copy the, the pushy men sales, masculine energy, like, we don't want to copy that, but I want to be wildly successful, but we don't have to copy that. Or a secular, you know, manifesting, you know, vision, whatever, like, we're not copying that. We're doing it differently. So Becky, what do you think it looks like to keep the goal and soften the approach or the living.

Becky Brown  24:30 
So I'm going to use my mental picture of that open hand again, because, like so I've been bringing this up in our conversations recently. This week, Laurie, my pastor last week, preached on how our circle of the things that we actually control is quite small, and we should be doing those things we should be.

Laurie Graham  24:48 
I hate that our control is so small.

Becky Brown  24:51 
The things we actually control. He did three different circles, and I'm not going to remember them. It's control on the inside is a small circle, and then, oh, control. And things that we're responsible for, like our kids, things like that, and a bigger circle, and then things that we influence, is the biggest circle. And so he was just talking about how there is kind of as Christians, this divine mystery of this beautiful relationship that is not super clear cut, because it's different for all of us in how we can control our controllables, faithful living, be obedient, do the things that that are good, healthy, helpful, supportive, Christ-like decisions in our little circle of control, and how we can keep all of that openhanded for the Lord to be the one in control of the results and the outcome, because that is often where our hardness comes from, is, ooh, I'm in control of the results and they aren't what I want, and so I better, like, try to control more things that are out of your control. And that's really frustrating, right? So that's what I would say is, yeah, set the business goals, and then remember, okay, like almost. So I've been doing this in my journal every day. Write down the list. These are the things I can control today. I can show up and I can do 30 minutes of writing. I can schedule these social media posts, I can send this email. I can create this product. And what can I not control today? I can't control how many of them sell. I can't control how many people open my email. I can't control I can impact it. I can influence it with certain decisions, and I can't control it. And so that has been a really helpful activity for me this week is separating those two.

Laurie Graham  26:37 
I love that. You know, this week's free Action Guide for everybody listening. It's called Soft, Not Smaller, A Language and Pressure Reset. I love this Action Guide. You absolutely need to get it. We always drop the weekly Action Guide, the link in the show notes and everything. But I want to talk about some of the phrases and some of the resets Becky, that you and I, that you and I use sometimes, yeah, you know, because softness becomes real when we catch ourselves and shift, right? Yeah, yeah. So what are some of those things that you maybe like you have phrases you even have some actions that you catch yourselves with sometimes, like, how do we make this shift?

Becky Brown  27:24 
Yeah, goodness, well, I think that the first important part is, is adding a pause. We're not going to notice this in ourselves. Like, we're not going to notice us functioning in crazy cartoon mode, right? We're not going to notice it without pausing and noticing, like, what's happening in our body is the stress rising? What's like, am I being frantic? Am I putting too much on my plate? Am I controlling the uncontrollable that happens in the pause that we stop and notice.

Laurie Graham  27:48 
Pausing is like, something we need to all practice, like, and I think you and I Becky, the more we have practiced this. Like you and I catch each other sometimes say, hey, take a breath. Yeah, or you'll be like, Laurie, you haven't slept like, yeah, you need to stop. You know, I think practicing a pause is so, so important. And sometimes I don't want to pause because it's going to stop my momentum. And for sure, that's doesn't help me live softly. I'll just say it. Sometimes I don't want to stop to eat, yeah, because it's going to stop my momentum. But that pause keeps us from making decisions out of urgency and panic and things like that.

Becky Brown  28:27 
Well, and I want to throw out there the importance of having somebody that you're talking to about your business. So if you don't have that person in your life, which I hope you do, I hope you have a Laurie in your life, but if you don't have that person, come join Soulful Strategy, because we can be your person. Come, come join with us, so that we can reflect back to you. Wow, you turned into crazy cartoon person. How can we help you come back to your priorities here, you know,

Laurie Graham  28:51 
And by the way, if you turn into crazy cartoon person, we both do too, so we're with you. Okay. Now, Becky, you also mentioned a body check. What do you mean by that? Yeah.

Becky Brown  28:59 
So just like you said, you notice anxiety right away in your body now. So there are signs, right? So how does anxiety show up in your body? You should probably know this about yourself. So for me, my shoulders tighten up, my jaw clenches. That's a big one for me. And my breathing gets more shallow and and so those, those are all things like, what just noticing like, okay, unclench your jaw. Take a second to rub your jawbone to help yourself relax, drop your shoulders. Take a second to wiggle your arms out, take a deep, intentional breath. Like, there are physical things that impact your emotions, your thoughts, all of these things, and that's really important.

Laurie Graham  29:42 
I've started even thinking about like, Well, recently, like, in the past couple days, so don't hold me to it, but I've started thinking about like, having a boundary line, like I don't want to cross this, like, if I'm getting harsh, or sometimes somebody I totally love is calling me on the phone, and I don't want to pick up the phone. I'm like, I don't want to be like that. Like, I don't want to be like that. Like, like, when I hit a place that's like, I can totally do this. And I want this. I want to finish my book. I want my conference to be successful, but not like this. It's almost like a place where my integrity is getting compromised. Like, I feel like I'm compromising my own integrity, the the person I want to be. Like, I can, I can do this, but not like this.

Becky Brown  30:27 
And I'm just going to throw out the practical example that you shared this morning, the thing that you woke up saying, I don't want to do this anymore. The other day, you worked really late into the night, and you said, Okay, I don't want to do this, so I am setting a nightly time limit I will not work past. And like you set a new boundary there because you lived it differently and said, Oh no, that's not how we're going to do this. That's not how my business will be successful.

Laurie Graham  30:53 
Yeah and I I think I kind of want to share that, because I had shared on one of these episodes, a few episodes back, that I have a hard stop now in the evening, and what Becky's referring to is I have broken that a couple times in the last couple weeks. And the other night, I worked really successfully until 11 o'clock at night, when I stay up too late, I don't sleep well. And what happened is that burst of energy and me getting stuff done totally wrecked me the next day, like I didn't have enough sleep. And I'm like, wow, that is, you know, and I think that's a great example to bring up. Like, I can totally do this thing, but not like this. And if I had hit that, like, I knew I had to get it done, and I wanted to get it done, but not like this. Like, that's a yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I think it's important. And it's a way to care for ourselves. Like, it's like, it's like, when your little one needs a nap, and no, they really need a nap. Like, this is good for you. It's good for you to sleep, y'all. It's good for you to eat healthy foods. Everyone listening. It's good for you to stop for lunch. It's good for you to take care of yourselves, right?

Becky Brown  31:54 
So let me think about the things that I say to my five-year-old, Noah on the phone with Laurie. Think about how I talk to him. That's how we should be talking to each other more often, like exactly. You don't feel like you need sleep right now, but I am going to set this boundary for you. This is naptime, is this is bedtime. And like I tell my five-year-old so often now, right now, your job isn't to control your brother. Your job is not to control this chore you're trying to do and you're frustrated by your job right now is to stay calm. Your only priority right now is to stay calm and like these things that would help us in our businesses, if we said that to ourselves.

Laurie Graham  32:32 
Oh my gosh, we should do a whole episode on Becky's parenting advice that crosses into business.

Laurie Graham  32:36 
I mean, that would really be so good. I want you to keep a list. Okay, before

Laurie Graham  32:41 
we wrap up, Becky, let's share a few like language swaps, like things that you and I've have looked at doing or wanted to do more of. And I'll start off with one that's been in my head. Like a lot of times I tell myself, I have to push through, I have to get this done. And I'm starting to say I can take the next right step, like, instead of I have to push through and get it done. One of the swaps I'm making is, is I can take the next right step, which helps me, like, break it down a little bit.

Becky Brown  33:07 
Yeah, so I would say one of the things that I think I've even brought up on a previous episode is that you, when you and I get frustrated and we're like, Oh, I'm not doing this the way I want to be doing this. And, like, we just start our we start getting really frustrated, is to remind ourselves we just haven't learned that yet. This part of my business is new. This is I'm trailblazing right now. I just haven't learned that yet. Is a really, really soft phrase that you and I use often.

Laurie Graham  33:31 
Yeah, yeah. Another one, which might sound kind of trite, but totally works for me, is I have a tendency of going to I'm behind all the time, like I'm behind, I'm behind. This is late, and I'm starting to say I am not behind, and this is a little bit of declarative, but I just want to say this is not positivity toxic for me the way I frame it, because I'm a little scared to say it. Instead of saying behind, I will say I'm not behind. This is actually right on time. But I'm just telling you all I mean that, yeah, like, I believe that God is with me in the moment, and this is how it should be, and I'm learning from it. And so I think it's important, if we do these swaps, we don't just do the swaps if we don't believe them, that does not work. Yeah. But when I'm like, when I have I'm behind in my head, I literally do stop and tell myself I'm not behind. This is right on time.

Becky Brown  34:23 
Yeah, yeah. So mine is, this shouldn't be this hard. This shouldn't be this hard. And I it's I have a few different language things that I respond to this. But you know how I had talked on a different podcast about how I say I need to respond to the body I have, not the body I wish I had. The same thing is true to your business. So this shouldn't be this hard. Okay, well, it is this hard. So how can I respond to what it actually is versus what I wish it were like? How can I respond differently and just let it be what it is, instead of trying to force it, it shouldn't be. It is, it is. So let's just approach it softly. And respond.

Laurie Graham  35:01 
Yeah. One more of mine is in this, again, is one of my spin-outs is that this is too much, like I'm doing too much. I get really overwhelmed. This is too much. And my swap, I don't have a good swap for that. Becky, right now, off the top of my head, what's my swap for that? Because you help me. Sometimes I say, this is a lot, yes, but it all doesn't have to be done now,

Becky Brown  35:22 
Yes, yes, that is often what we do. Yes, it is a lot, and you can do this, and you can do the next best thing, and you know, this is a lot, and, I don't. That's enough for now, I'm sure I have more.

Laurie Graham  35:35 
But this is a little longer than normal too. So I do want to just wrap up and say soft doesn't mean stopping. It doesn't mean stopping forever. It doesn't even mean letting go your goals. It's just a different way of going through life. And so we're exploring this together. I was really excited to talk about this and actually interrupt our podcast plan, because next week, we're going to be talking about writing the book, and I hate the stats it makes. This is why I'm so excited to talk about this, because so many people like, it's a huge proportion of people, I don't know the stats of who want to write a book. Like so many people say I want to write a book, or I always thought I'd write a book, or I was gonna write a book. And everybody dies without writing a book. And so we're gonna they do like, I mean, this is this. You could read, you could google it. Like, I mean, it's a huge amount of people who say they want to write a book who don't write a book. And so because in a lot of it has to go with it feels so hard. Yeah, feels hard. It feels overwhelming. It feels all this.

Laurie Graham  36:29 
And so we're actually going to teach you all how to write a book softly, like, how to how to live softly and write a book like, we're not talking about doing less. Yep, in some ways I don't know I'm talking about accomplishing more, quite honestly, like I want to accomplish in my life. Yeah, I want to do it differently. So yeah, we're going to have

Becky Brown  36:50 
boundaries, and we're going to respond to ourselves softly and all of those things. So that's, that's what we talked about today. We talked about softness, and that we fall into this trap of hardness. And when easy doesn't feel realistic, we default to hard mode. And so we talked about how softness doesn't mean doing less, it just means doing those same things differently, with boundaries, with different responses to ourselves, with a different posture of how we approach it, noticing, pausing, noticing when we turn into crazy cartoon character.

Laurie Graham  37:24 
Yep, and we want to example, like we want to be the people that we're talking about right here. And Becky, I think we're learning and growing all the time, and I'm really sometimes it terrifies me that we're doing it in public, but I don't know. I like it when people share for real in public, and we get to walk with people and have new friends all across the world. So in the next day or so, if you catch yourself like slipping into this hard place, negative place, critiquing place, internal violence. I know I said that one point, like, just practice one soft switch and again, make sure you download that free Action Guide, because it's going to give you more phrases and things. It's a language, and pressure reset. You're going to love it. The link is in the show notes. So thank you so much for listening to smart, soulful business. I hope you liked our little, little bit of a rabbit trail today before we get into our next series. If this conversation hits home, would you please share it with somebody? You're not alone in what you're carrying in this conversation that we have, and not even just our women friends, but how many women are out there trying to start businesses, trying to make some side income, trying to build like real things that are going to help their family and help the world. If you do want some ongoing support, come join us in Soulful Strategy Community. The link is in the show notes. This is where we keep walking it out together in real life, without hype and without shame. And if this episode encourages you, please leave a quick review. It helps more women find us and these conversations. And I really believe what we're talking about really matters. It's made a difference in my life and Becky's life, in our life together as we walk and talk on the show and personally as well. So we'll see you next time on Smart Soulful Business.