15: Who is the "self" behind your business? 2024 Reflections

2024 is coming to an end and I want to reflect and ask the questions if you are taking time to intentionally cultivate the self behind your business? 

I was inspired by the conversation by the book Finding Yourself by Sally Hope and I want to answer the question in this episode of who is yourself in your business? How are you cultivating your business and experience? I want to answer this by using the metaphors in the book of how a bonsai tree and snowflake are created and for you to tune into how you've created and lived through your business this year. 

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Transcript

Gabrielle: [00:00:00] You're listening to expand You're listening to expand with Gabrielle, where you will learn how to use ancient wisdom and new age science to create your dream life. Here I ground the woo and demystify powerful spiritual concepts to support your spiritual entrepreneur journey. We are talking out with the old toxic masculine boss, babe culture of hustle, burnout, and anxiety and in with the creatrix energy of creating through ease, magnetism, and flow.

Okay. Thank you. Let's get into it.

Hello. Hello. So today we're going to dive into working on the self behind your business. And we're going to be talking about some concepts from a book called finding yourself by Sally Hope. But this story that I want to open up this episode with is so good. So I want to invite you to contemplate this idea of a bonsai [00:01:00] tree versus snowflake.

It sounds so silly, but stay with me. So, bonsai trees are grown, not by gardeners, but by artists. The cultivator of the bonsai designs the tree in advance. As it grows, they repot, they prune, and they graft to create the tree according to their vision, ensuring the conditions are right for the specific design and removing anything that begins to grow that doesn't visually align.

Now, in contrast, snowflakes are made entirely by their environment. So they are not thought of in advance. They are not intentionally crafted or cultivated. They are what is made spontaneously by the exact conditions in the sky when the snowflake falls. So you can see. That one forms on accident, the snowflake, and one is specifically [00:02:00] designed.

So there is beauty in both, but when you think about yourself and when you think about the self behind your business, I want to ask you to think about and sit with, are you more like the snowflake or are you more like the bonsai? Are you taking time to intentionally cultivate the self behind? Who is building your business, or is that self, this version of you being spontaneously and erratically created in response to environmental stimulus, meaning are you just responding to your environment, to circumstances that show up to, you know, whatever's put in your path.

Are you like this ship being tossed around at sea? Are you sitting down and intentionally cultivating the version of you, the self, who you need to be to be so [00:03:00] successful in your endeavors, to be so successful and impactful in your business or in what you're creating? Because there's this beautiful quote by Thomas Szasz that says, the self is not something one finds, it's something one creates.

And this is something that I deeply, deeply believe in, and something that we talk about a lot in the School of Expansion, and we dive into huge depth around. Is this cultivating this intentional creation of self? And the self that we know, that you need to be in order to hit the milestones you want to hit in order to create the success you want to create in order to have the impact, the followers, the community, the whatever that you are desiring.

What is that self that'll get you there? And how do you go about cultivating it? Are you the bonsai? Do you think about these things? Are you intentional about the way that you behave, the way that you think, your skill sets, [00:04:00] your core values, like how you spend your time and your energy? Are you creating this, this sought after energy or is your energy just readily available and given to things that maybe aren't important to you?

Just cause you feel like you should or you have to. So this is some really good stuff to think about towards the end of the year when you look back and you think about how did you spend your time this year? How did you spend your energy? Are you cultivating yourself like a bonsai tree? Are you specifically thinking about which ways you want to expand and grow?

And are you pruning away what no longer serves you? Are you releasing the aspects that aren't in harmony anymore? Are you thinking about which aspects aren't in harmony anymore that need to be released that are made to be blocking you from your next up level, from your next quantum leap, from your next success.

And so right now, as I'm recording this episode, I'm actually in Thailand with some of my good friends who have now grown their net [00:05:00] worth to be multiple millions over the last couple of years. And we're talking about, you know, the projects they've been working on and they're telling us stories. What's running through my mind when I'm listening to these stories is that this was all very, very intentionally cultivated.

They did not stumble upon this on accident. This was something that they decided to go after. They decided to create. Yes. The opportunities presented themselves where they decided to be brave and take action. And it was very intentional. how they have built their wealth is by building villas in Bali.

And they intentionally decided to start, to learn, to keep going, to learn from their mistakes again, to keep going. And now at this point they've built dozens and dozens of these villas. And they've done really, really well for themselves. And they're absolutely loving what they're doing. But this wasn't by accident.

It wasn't like a snowflake that just randomly spontaneously was created purely by [00:06:00] environment. It was very, very, very much a bonsai tree in the sense where they saw the opportunity. And they decided to start crafting and cultivating this business, this framework, these desires that they had to build this wealth, their family and how they want to be able to take their family on trips like the one we're on right now in Thailand.

They've been traveling for a month just like us being able to completely log off and be present and they can do all of this because they've created that freedom. But they did that intentionally. They were thinking. about the version of themselves that they needed to be. They were thinking about the direction of their vision, of their goals, of their business.

So some ideas that I'd like to leave you with are, do you feel that you are intentionally cultivating your vision? Do you feel like you had a clear vision for 2024 and [00:07:00] were able to execute on that and create? Or do you feel like you were a leaf being blown around in the wind? Maybe every now and then you were grounded enough to make some intentional decisions, but more or less you were just reacting to what the environment put in front of you.

And if you want to change that, if you want to step into this other energy, this very like rooted energy of being so clear on what it is that you want, on being so clear on how to go about getting it and continuously working on the self behind your business, behind your goals to clear any blocks that you may have.

any limiting beliefs, anything stopping you, holding you back to work on your paradigm, that I invite you to join the school of expansion. It's a year long program where this is the exact work that we do. It's very intentional. It's very specific for female entrepreneurs who want to hit that next income bracket.

You have to be spiritual. You have to understand the certain [00:08:00] fundamentals of energetics and understanding the power of thoughts and meditation. And this work that we do in the school is a bit more advanced. It's for the women who already have this kind of baseline understanding and are ready to crack open more to create more room for success and abundance and really hit that next income bracket.

 So if this is sounding exciting to you, then check out some of the links below in the show notes. And if this is not the time for you, then I invite you to sit with this idea of how to cultivate more intentionality behind yourself. Because with neuroscience, we've proven that the brain has what's called plasticity.

Meaning that we get to decide who we are and who we want to be. At any given moment, we can change these pathways in our brain. We can change our habits, we can change our thoughts, and then we can change our reality. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear from you. I am @expandwithgabrielle on Instagram and it makes me so happy when I hear from listeners just like you about which episodes really hit home.

Today was nice and short and sweet, but power packed. So if you had any takeaways that really resonated, I would love to hear from you. Otherwise, I will see you on the next episode.