Solo - How to Expand, in your life & business

How to expand to your fullest scale; facing the fear of rejection

Beauties, welcome to this week's episode of Finding Your Way Home; a tender and intimate Solo episode on the theme of expansion. How we can allow ourselves to truly, congruently and in full authenticity reach our full scale. 

How often have you / do you find yourself shrinking? Shying away from a next wave of visibility; blocking yourself from the next step in your business; hiding at a social event while playing the pernicious compare~despair game; pretending that you want less for yourself than you really do in your heart; even, keeping mute when your opinion on even the smallest topic veers from popular opinion. 

It's so persuasive - the deep human need for belonging - and unwatched, causes so much compromise in who we allow ourselves to be. So in this week's episode I guide you through the question of "Bigness": what facilitates it, what stands in the way, why we are so afraid for rejection in the face of it, and how we can test-the-theory of our own fears. 

Come on a little journey with me to identify where you sit on the spectrum, and what you can do if you desire greater freedom to expand... And make sure to listen until the end, where I share some of the beautiful things coming up this year, and ways you self-developers can get involved. 

Love, always

Anthea x

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Transcript

0:02

Desire can't trump environment. So I can have a wish. to be a different way, to feel a different way, to take different actions. But if I am returning again and again and again to the scene of the crime, of the crimes gone by, then it's going to be really difficult for my physiology and my mental patterning, which is oriented towards habit repetition, and it's oriented towards really making shortcuts to make your life easier, almost similarly to the way that the fascia binds around your standard posture. It's there really designed to make things easier for you, to cut the loop. And so if your environment is constantly reiterating a series of beliefs or a series of experiences, then changing the fundamentals of the ecosystem that you live your life in is going to make an enormous difference.

Anthea: 0:59

welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

1:49

All right my gorgeous creatures, we are sitting down for a little bit of cozy sofa time to record a solo episode of the podcast on the critical theme of allowing yourself to be your full size. So this topic came up for me because last night I had the great gift and joy of heading over to Soho House to listen to a talk given by the wonderful, the only, Bessie Carter, who as you know Um, has become not just a client, but a dear friend, and she and I are putting together this really beautiful three hour immersive workshop in March, on the 8th of March, all around how do creatives and actors find their way towards embodiment? How do they really move past the nervousness? The hesitancy, the stories, the social discomfort of stepping forward into the role that they choose, into the cast that they want to work with, into the sorts of opportunities that really express something of the talent and creativity and energy that they have inside. And one of the People that was at the talk, she's such a sweetheart. She's early in her acting career. She's just leaving drama school. You know, she, she asked this question about networking. She was like, what do we, what do we do if we're newly out in the world? And really committed to the work that we do. Really, really committed to developing our talent and our career. But find ourselves in social context, in that milieu of hobnobbing and conversing, find ourselves really getting stuck. Getting into this place of shyness and blockage. And one of the stories that she mentioned in particular, that kept her trapped. was, um, you know, actors are known for being way too much, way too emotional, way too hogging of the limelight, which really made me smile because of course that's part of what we love about this terrain of acting is that it gives us license if we're in it or if we're watching it to experience someone being at full scale. And when Bessie and I were talking about that particular topic, you know, she described her journey going from a place where she had had to adopt a ton of strategies to keep herself small in a way that was very distorted relative to the extroversion and the energy that she had. And she had to gradually actually let go of each and every one of those crutches that she used from alcohol to smoking to particular ways of socializing to particular friendships that really weren't in service to her authenticity. Relationships in which she felt small, she felt belittled, she felt, um, seen as less than somehow. And I want to sort of hallmark that last point by saying that quite often you won't necessarily be aware that you're in that dynamic at the time. But as you leave the context, the environment of that person, you'll gain this, this feeling, this impression of just not being quite right. It's a, an itchy, sticky feeling underneath the skin. And it's really fundamentally a sense of disquiet which you might have picked up from their nervous system patterning, you might have picked it up from their posturing, you might have picked it up because although they're saying one thing in their verbal words and they're posturing particular facial expressions, actually what they're expressing underneath, in terms of belief or intention, is not that. It's some sort of distrust or disquiet or suspicion or guarding. And I really want to validate for each and every person that's listening to this already and thinking, Oh yeah, God, I have relationships like that in my life where I just don't feel right afterwards. And somehow the storyline that I create afterwards is I am not enough. That old gorgeous chestnut that we so enjoy coming back to. If you have relationships like that in your life and you often justify yourself to stay in them on the basis that, well, they're a good person. And, um, you know, they haven't done anything particularly obvious to me. The thing I really, really want to honor and acknowledge within you is that there is something of uncertainty within you. There is something that you are receiving in that two way exchange that is not sampa to your system, that is not digestible, that is not quite in alignment with what's going on on the surface. And I like to emphasize that because there is so much going on. Even for me working day to day in a one to one client based capacity where there are boundaries and structures and codes of conduct and, um, agreements that we've literally specified with each other by word and by pen, even then. There are moments of confusion and layer and nuance and stickiness where myself and the person that I'm supporting will be invited to go deeper into What is really happening in our relational field here? what is the statement beneath the statement that maybe wants to be aired? And if we were to look at this from a systems theory, even from an internal family systems theory, perhaps what parts, as that framework could understand it, what parts, what sub personalities, what adaptations, what leanings are being expressed in me in this dynamic. So if we go back to our original topic of how do I really allow myself to be my full size, a really good starting place is notice the circumstances in which you're not. So as you're listening, just do a little scan, just a teeny tiny scan in your life. And notice the environments where you do not feel able to be fully the scale, the temperament, the personality that you are. Whether that's your working environment. Whether that's a relationship scenario, whether that's with your family, super super common, um, whether that's even in the way that you are with yourself. I've been having a big deep dive since coming back from Miami on the habits of my day and my physical environment because what we know from, the neuroscience, what we know from the perspective of habit change, what we know from a ton of incredible studies that are coming out is that desire cannot trump environment. All right, I'm going to say that again. Desire can't trump environment. So I can have a wish. to be a different way, to feel a different way, to take different actions. But if I am returning again and again and again to the scene of the crime, of the crimes gone by, then it's going to be really difficult for my physiology and my mental patterning, which is oriented towards habit repetition, and it's oriented towards really making shortcuts to make your life easier, almost similarly to the way that the fascia binds around your standard posture. It's there really designed to make things easier for you, to cut the loop. And so if your environment is constantly reiterating a series of beliefs or a series of experiences, then changing the fundamentals of the ecosystem that you live your life in is going to make an enormous difference. If you're noticing in relation to that question that it's much more in a working capacity that you don't feel your full scale, then the question that I would encourage you to ask yourself is, I wonder what it is that I'm believing about my work, and I wonder what it is, or what complex of beliefs I'm believing about my role in my work, that make me feel more curtailed than I wish to be. And obviously that will encroach on the relational field. So it will be impossible for you to think about your work, I would wager, unless you're purely a solopreneur working on systems or in, um, crypto. It's going to be quite difficult for you to think about your work separated from the people involved in your work. And that's a really good thing because Human beings fundamentally are relational creatures. We are designed to be in cohabitation, communion, co creation, and that's part of why society is in the place that it's in, that we've lost the tendency to approach each other with trust and collaboration, and we've moved into this state of societal and statewide separation that creates a hell of a lot of fear. It's a topic for another time, but it speaks to the point of your work is human. So your belief systems will be touching on your belief systems around those human beings that you interact with. And I want you to just notice, do I apply hierarchy? Do I apply power dynamics? Do I feel that sense of disquiet that we were talking about earlier, that there are relationships within my profession where it feels necessary for me to shrink either because the other person really likes to take up a big scale, which happens, or because there is something in me that is so afraid of angering or upsetting that person as my own self protective mechanism that I will not let myself expand beyond a certain point. We can even have this dynamic going on with our coaches, with our therapists, with our movement practitioners. It happens all over because, in a sense, power and hierarchy are something we are sniffing out. They're not necessarily rational in relation to the actual service provision. So I have a great personal example. This is revealing the inward aspects of my mind for those that want to hear. Yesterday I had the joy and I actually do always really enjoy it of having an annual meeting with my financial advisors and for the record team, if you are operating a business and you do not have people guiding you on how to invest your very well earned money, you need to be doing that. It is a. It's a fantastic way of learning, and I find financial practice really interesting. It's also a fantastic way of taking charge and making conscious decisions. Even if you have someone advising you, fundamentally, you are getting practice in being in the driver's seat because they are taking guidance from you. They are taking instruction from you. You are signing agreements to have them support you in particular ways relative to what your financial structure is. And in the same way that we have accountants to support us in the tidiness of our annual accounts, then having financial planners, even if you've only got a tiny amount of savings, is really useful. So I get invited to this unbelievably swanky office in London. And I'm suited and booted because that is my, my adoration of recent times is really dressing in the clothes that represent the woman that I am. And I used to be in corporate. I had a decade of, um, corporate schmoozing as a first and art historian, then a corporate fundraiser within big museums. So this world is really familiar to me, the world of pitching and proposing and, uh, showing up, in a costume that allows you to rise to the challenge. But, as I walked into this office, I realized this grain of fragility within me. And I was flummoxed by it because it's been a phenomenally busy, beautiful period, uh, in the business, in the podcast, in client life. They're going from strength to strength. The team in the embodiment immersion are just doing phenomenal work. We're gearing up for the launch of this year's program. We're going to have a gorgeous big 3d event, which I will tell you guys about at toward the end of the episode. But ostensibly everything is going really well. And as I tuned in, tapped into my body, noticed where that experience was living within me and really dropped into what is the part of me that's speaking here? How young is she? How is she doing? What is she afraid of? How does she view the world? What I realised was that there had been a little moment in my personal life that had led me to feel small. And not just small in terms of what I was able to express, but small in my age. And of course that smallness of my age triggers me, trips me into particular ways of behaving. And I am the same as everyone that listens to this. I have all of my own moments of encountering my little ones. It does not matter how much work you do. And I've been doing this work for 15 years. It does not matter how much work you do. The reality is, we all have those parts. Not all of them are integrated. Of course, that is the case for every regular human being. And even more so for people that push themselves toward phenomenal feats of courage. So I had tripped myself into that place, and then I had busied, because there's a lot to do, and there's a lot to be, and I had busied, and it was only when I was walking into the office that I noticed the instability, because what was I believing in that moment? I was believing that I had to impress my financial ladies. And as I climbed the stairs, the idea of that suddenly felt so ludicrous, because I pay them. These are my assets. They are employed by a company. I am leading a business and that doesn't make me better than them, but it definitely doesn't make me less than. And by the time I got to the top of the flight of stairs, of course, I was back in my body, back in my age, back in the clothing that I was wearing as a true representation of who I was. And I walked into the office. We had an amazing hour long meeting. We then went into another hour long meeting I sailed out of the whole thing. feeling very calm and regulated and, and, and feeling very much myself with nothing to have to impress on anyone else. And then of course, going to this event in the evening. And that's the key question. And that's the key question asked of Bessie. How does she allow herself to be big? And so I want to emphasize for those that are listening that are trying to really cultivate this greater degree of nervous system regulation when they move themselves into greater capacity, into more elevated spaces, into being around people that are six, seven, eight figure earners. If those are metrics that you're interested in, you don't have to be. Um, It is to normalise the fact that it's going to take a little bit of, internal conversationing in order to really get close to yourself in those moments where it would be so much easier to shrink. One of the phrases I was given a while ago and I really adore is this idea of, well let's just try it and see. It's a sort of proving it mentality where you can take a belief that you have, let's say it's a limiting or negative one And rather than living your life according to protecting yourself from that belief, which is what normally happens, and certainly what's happened for all of us in different circumstances, instead what you do is a conscious decision that you're willing to brave the possibility that that outcome could come true. You're willing to brave the possibility that XYZ person might not like you if you don't please them. That, uh, your client might be frustrated if you have to cancel a session with a little bit of notice because you're unwell. You test the theory that your, uh, event will tank. Uh, because, you know, that stuff is never in your control. And what comes of that consciousness to be courageous enough to face the challenge is as soon as you make the decision There's this liberation of the energy that you were using to try and keep yourself contained and protected, which then gets to be employed in the joy and the play and the zeal of doing the thing. And what I know in my own life is every time I've thrown myself towards something with a kind of, Eh, fuck it, let's see. What's ended up happening is that I've had a degree of playfulness and lightness. Because I know that I have the forbearance actually to handle whatever comes. And I know that through consistent trial and error, through every single moment where I have pushed my own boundaries from a place of aligned consciousness, not doing it recklessly, not doing it unsafely, not doing it through coercion, but doing it through that moment where I'm with myself and I can say, No, I actually want this more than I'm afraid of it. I know that my mind My really intelligent, protective mind would like to think that the fear is greater than my desire, but actually, my desire is greater than my fear, and I know that by asking myself, what if I wasn't afraid, what will I do? I also know this from having these conversations again and again and again with the clients that I work with. Whether it's the conversation at the get go of whether they want to embark on this incredible journey together, or whether they're on the edges of whether they join their next training, or whether they are doing something big and juicy and meaty in their own business, each and every one of them has to have that negotiation moment with themselves. Am I willing to face the fear, which by that stage feels so visceral and somatic that there is a very distinct part of you that's desperately trying to run away. And if we can be still in that moment, if we can continue to show up and be with it through all of the tools that you guys know, if we can be willing to just pause, then the mirage of that fear, poof! It disappears in the moment that we stand into courage. What I also know is that what you expect to happen will never be what happens. Ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever. Even the intentions that you have when you start something will never be actually what the meaning is in the long term. So I've shared with you before that the biggest takeaway for me from the podcast, which I did through sheer instinct rather than a business desire or anything else, the biggest impact for me has been connection. Which, of course, is beautifully perfect and ironic given the name of the podcast, Finding Your Way Home. It's about connecting back to authenticity and human connection. Expansion and love and beauty. So I'm going to come back, let's bring ourselves back, right into this topic of expansion. Right into this topic of really reaching into the fingertips of your long and elastic creative body. And I'm going to ask you a very clear question as you listen, just now. Where in my life am I most shying away from expansion? From fulfilling the scale that I really deeply know that I have in me and I really truly desire? Where am I doing that? What is the physiological sensation when I do that? You can write these down. What do I believe about myself when I do shrink? So in a sense, what am I encouraging myself to continue to believe? And what might the vulnerable part of me need in order to be courageous enough to just move a little bit further toward that opening, starting line? If I could move that little tiny bit more by stabilizing a part of me that needs support. Through speaking out to someone, through therapy, through whatever practice is the most resonant for you. If I could do that, how would I then feel and believe about myself? Who would I then show up as? And if I do the thing, and I learn that I can withstand, not only the fear, but any possible outcome that might be on my doorstep, Then who would that make me? And what even bigger reaches would I go for? This is about really validating, giving voice to your desire team. I talk about it a lot. What is meaningful for you? What do you want? What do you love? What is the closest to your heart as expression or creation? And why the hell aren't we doing it? Because I know all of the rational reasons that you can tell me, and I can tell me, to not do it. And I know just what happens when with patience and with care and with love and with support, we move ourselves outwards. It has been the changing of a life that was, for me, before this tanning of my thirties, was so small and so quiet. And so shrouded in pain and disconnection. You know, dissociated on every level. From other people, from the love that they had for me, from my own body, from my own power. And I just don't want you to have to live a second more of that than you have to. If my experience can be anything of a support or a balm to get you a little bit further forwards with all of the love in my heart, that is my deepest wish and desire. And on that note, we're going to wrap up for today. And I'm going to leave you with just a little taste, a little flavor of what is coming up in the world of AB Embodiment Finding Your Way Home. It is the most phenomenal year and we're having such fun as a team really identifying what are going to be the most meaningful experiences for all of you. What are the ways that you're saying you want to get involved? Who are the speakers that you want to be hearing from? Um, and how do we really get to harness all of that in the most Streamlined in an efficient way possible to bring it to you, uh, at quick time with greatest richness. So, on the 8th of March is the opportunity to be in person with Bessie and I. We're going to be a really select little group. I think we've got a capacity of 35 tickets, quite a few of which have already gone. Hop onto, um, the Soul Studio website. So Soul Studio based in Primrose Hill, it's in Berkeley Grove. And you will find that workshop listed at 2. 30pm, uh, on the 8th of March. three hours, if you're any form of creative, visionary, actor, uh, director, producer, songwriter, any of these fields, even as a practitioner that wants to get to a greater degree of confidence in their stage presence, please come and be with us. we've priced it really affordably to make sure it's as accessible as possible to you. Coming up after that, the beginning of April, there'll be a couple of things in between, but at the beginning of April, I'm going to be doing a three day event online to give you guys a really clear series of takeaways around how to deeply, deeply embody your greatest potency as a practitioner. So this is particularly for those that are listening that are mind or body facilitators, coaches, therapists, um, anyone that works one to one with others. Any form of teaching really is gonna super benefit from the tools that I'm gonna be sharing, the insights that we're gathering from somatic and trauma work, um, a lot of the insights of neuroscience to really arm you with not only understanding, but the practices that are gonna help you to up level your degree of presence and insight when you're working with another person. So that then leads us into the next round of the embodiment training, which is kicking off at the end of May. As you guys might know, we're turning it into a beautiful full certification so that you are able to come in and certify as an embodiment coach, really as a master facilitator of the practices that we're going to be teaching. You will be going through an incredible immersive experience. As a student, your personal relationships, your personal self understanding, your professional capacity, your business planning, All of that will be going through its own deep evolution and journey. So that's the training. And then this final little nugget, which is also woven into the training for people that join at that platinum level, is we have our incredible Costa Rican experience. It's landing at the beginning of September. It's A beautiful six days, completely private eco forest, being readied for our arrival, uh, organic food, gorgeous nourishing sleep. And this six days of incredible rooting sacred practice to take you deeper into your heart than you have ever been. We are really limited in places for that, and I'm making sure that we cultivate a group of women that are just incredible. You'll be with a very elevated energy as far as the people that are there, and that's a huge part of what I wanted to bring into this experience. That you find yourselves with people that are doing All of the same nitty gritty, beautiful, impactful work in the world, and that that energy and those connections which you'll have thereafter will really support you in the coming six months, year, two years. So for all of this, any inquiries about any of these ways of getting involved, please, please, please just drop me a message on Instagram. I'm at ab underscore embodiment. Or send us an email to the email address listed in the show notes. Super easy to get in touch. Myself or the team will come back to you directly. We answer every single message. Um, and if this episode has been useful for you, I would so Relish and appreciate it if you would consider sharing it with just one person that you love, that you think might benefit from the tools. I send you such adulation on this gorgeous day and I can't wait to be with you again soon. Bye team. gorgeous listeners. Thank you. So. So. much. For your ears. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.