Ep. 13: Holding the Weight: Preparing for God's Abundance in Business (Romans 12:6-8)

In this episode, Dr. Lee Cordell shares a profound personal revelation about preparing for the "weight" of God's blessing in business. 

Many entrepreneurs strive for abundance, but few consider the responsibility and capacity required to truly hold it. Dr. Lee dives into the critical importance of aligning your values and understanding your God-given spiritual gifts to build a business that can not only achieve success but sustain it with peace and joy. 

She challenges the conventional wisdom of business building, urging listeners to co-create with God and design their ventures in alignment with their divine purpose, avoiding the pitfalls of worldly strategies that lead to burnout and misalignment. 

This episode is an essential guide for any C-Suite Kingdom Seeker ready to embrace true, God-centered growth.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The "Weight" of Abundance: Understand that increased revenue, clients, and impact come with greater responsibility and require expanded capacity.
• Values Alignment as Foundation: Discover how clearly defined, biblically-backed values are crucial for building a business that can withstand the "weight" without feeling overwhelming or misaligned.
• Unlocking Your Spiritual Gifts for Entrepreneurship: Explore the seven spiritual gifts from Romans 12:6-8 and how understanding and developing them in a divinely directed way is key to sustainable, joyful business building.
• Avoiding Worldly Pitfalls: Learn why blindly following conventional business frameworks can lead to burnout and misalignment if not submitted to God's direction.
• God-Led Business Building: Embrace the concept of co-creating with God, listening for His nudges, and building your offers, marketing, selling, and delivery processes in alignment with your unique gifting.
• Supernatural Abilities & Divine Nudges: Recognize that God may call you to develop skills outside your natural comfort zone for His kingdom purposes, just as He did with Moses.

Ready to dive into better discerning your Spiritual Gifts as a CEO/Entrepreneur? 

Join us inside Grow In Your Gifts 10 day program, beginning March 23rd inside our Skool Community. 

Connect with Dr. Lee and the Regulated Roots Community:

Visit our new website: regulatedroots.com

Join our FREE Skool Community: The Regulated Roots Academy is a free community for faith-led entrepreneurs to connect, learn, and grow. Access free courses, resources, and bi-weekly Q&A sessions with Dr. Lee. 

Follow on TikTok: @leechelseacordell

Connect on LinkedIn: Dr. Lee Cordell

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So this is our first bi-weekly training call. The way that it is going to go moving forward is that I'm going to start off the first, probably two-thirds talking through what will become a podcast episode. So we have a podcast called C-Suite Kingdom Seekers. The podcast is really geared towards both those people who are in traditional corporate professional positions and then also entrepreneurs because you are the CEOs. You are oftentimes the CEO, the COO, you are the entire C-suite. These trainings that we're doing here will actually end up going on our podcast every other week. And then I've got some really incredible guests that come on the other weeks. So we have Kurt Euler, who was just on the podcast today. He has managed multiple billion-dollar businesses and done over 60 like sales exit plans in the billions. So the coolest part about his story is his story is so God-centered. And so we didn't even talk about a lot of the stuff that he had done in business. We talked about a lot of the ways that he incorporated servant leadership into his roles in these companies after he had a literal come to Jesus moment. And we have such incredible leaders and entrepreneurs and professionals who are going to be on the podcast guesting. So invitation to go check that out. And then we'll get into QA. So if you're here with me live, while you're listening, if you have any questions, if you want me to dive deeper into something after I wrap up the training part, please drop those as I'm speaking. All right. I don't want you to feel like you have to wait till the end. And then at the end, what we'll do is you can actually come on camera if you want and we can do a little bit of QA, or you can stay off camera. Okay. Today I actually want to talk through a topic that I was not planning on talking about. I was driving to this meeting just a little bit ago, and he talked about just like being obedient to God. He was like, Yeah, you're not talking about what you thought you were talking about. You're talking about this. And I was like, okay, let's do it. So I'm going to give you a little bit of backstory. This episode is about how you handle the suddenly moment. Okay. And I haven't heard a lot of people have this conversation because I think in most entrepreneurial spaces, the main question people have is how do I get it to work? How do I start? How do I scale? How do I get to the point that like I have this abundance? I have this weight that is within my business. And when I say weight, the weight of responsibility, the weight of revenue coming in, like you're receiving assets, you're receiving clients, you're receiving spons responsibility, you're receiving money, you're receiving time, you're receiving things that require capacity from you. So about three to four weeks ago, I was in church. My husband and I are Catholic, and that's an important part of the story because at Catholic Church, before you go out for communion, which we have communion every time, we say our Lord's Prayer, we extend everybody around us peace, and then we do a couple more things, and then we kneel and we kneel until it's our turn to get up, rise, and go to the front of the church and get communion. And then when we come back, we kneel until Jesus in the communion wafer is put back. Now, like I said, that's an important part of the story because it is a time that, like, you we are really supposed to be very reverent. And it is one of my favorite times to talk to God because He's literally in the room. That's what we believe. So there's just this presence of Jesus. And right as I was saying our Lord's Prayer, like we hold our hands out. And so if I've got my kiddos or my husband next to me, I'll hold their hands. And I have my hands out and I'm saying the prayer. And right as I'm done saying the prayer, I hear God say to me, Are you ready to hold the weight? He said, I have been preparing you to hold this weight. This weight is going to be heavy. And this is what we've been practicing for. This is what you've been getting developed for. This is why last year your word of the year was discipline and you practiced being very obedient and doing very difficult things even when you didn't want to. This is why you've been practicing saying no and holding discomfort and holding disappointment from yourself and others, and like really walking through this process alongside with me. You've been co-creating with me and with your husband. And so I'm about to put weight on you. And I want you to be prepared. And it almost brings me to tears right now as I'm saying it, because for a moment I went, I don't know that I'm ready for that.

unknown 4:48

Right?

SPEAKER_00 4:49

I don't know that I'm ready for that responsibility. Responsibility has always been something for me that there's been a lot of dysregulation in that based on how I was raised, based on my personality, based on my spiritual gifting profile. So I remember being like, God, I trust you. If you're ready, I'm ready. Now, at this point, almost to the day, I had been praying, and God had also been like, okay, it's time for you to take your spiritual gifts programming that you have been working on since August of last year. It's time for you to take this public. And so I had put up a video on TikTok that was inviting people and letting them know, hey, we're about to start this academy's coming public. We're gonna have courses that are free. I wasn't planning on doing any trainings like this. I wasn't planning on there being any sort of actual community piece other than just putting the trainings out. And so God in that prayer time very like clearly nudged me and was like, Yeah, just go test the waters. Go see if you put this out there, if you would get a response. And I did. We did. It was beautiful. And once we had that response from like 15, 20 people, that was the green light to go, okay, let's go ahead and create this. And as I sat down to create it, I was using a bunch of skills that over the last 10, 12 years I've developed. Like I've ran 5,000 plus member Facebook groups, I've hosted membership programs before, I've done all of this before, back when we had a secular business. And so I wasn't planning on any of that. As we were sitting down and thinking about what we wanted to offer, I was having conversations with TLC, my husband. And he was like, I want to make sure we do this differently than we ever have. Because typically, when you offer free things like this, sometimes you can get burned out. And so let's make sure that we have the capacity. And I was like, I love this because I was praying in church and I heard, are you ready to hold the weight? And I love that you're asking these questions to make sure that we're able to hold the weight. So we sat down, we had a conversation, I prayed on it a few more days, just let it let the Holy Spirit work on it while I was doing what I was doing. And that's when the school community came up. And so we decided to open the school community. And as we're setting things up, I was like, man, this would be really cool to have calls in here and to just be able to like pour into people and serve in this way that God's really been calling me to serve and teach and support people on this journey because, oh my goodness, would I have loved to have had a space like this? Would I have loved to have had a regulated Roots Academy for me when I was originally starting my business? Because if I had, I probably wouldn't have gone off into the new age spiritually woo-woo like spaces that I did at times that really led me astray. So we set that up. And then we also had waited until our website was done. I had spent six months, the better part of six months, planning out our website and building it on the back end. And I share all of that because when we brought this public and we had all these people starting to show up and say, yes, I'm interested in this, everything was already really done, other than that school community. And so it felt very safe to go, okay, what do I need to do in order to be able to set this up? Okay, great, let's do that. That's gonna take me like a weekend. All right, let's go. Over the last week, we have been also implementing a new social media approach. And it's not technically new, but we're just doing it a slight tweak different than we used to before. And with that, the weight is coming. And what I mean by that, not W A I T, like we're done waiting, like the weight of things coming in, the receptivity of things coming in is so profound. We're having multiple videos go mini viral, but hundreds of comments, like a ton of people asking to join things. We're having people book one-on-one calls, we're having people join our First Fruits Incubator and our Harvest Collective. We're having people reach out about agency services. We have over a hundred plus new people that we've never met before who are joining the school community. We have hundreds, I think actually almost at this point, thousands of new followers between TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And so the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because number one, I want to walk through no matter where you're at in your business. If you are starting, if you are scaling, if you're at the point that you have scaled and you're trying to sustain or you're trying to actually step out and allow other people to step in and take over some of the things you're doing. No matter where you're at, if you have been in this waiting period where you're like, I'm waiting patiently for God to bring the weight, I want to walk you through a couple of these steps to make sure that no matter where you're at in the process, you have checked these boxes so that when the abundance comes in, you have the capacity to hold it because, and people don't talk about this. You having a business that has a lot of clients, that has a lot of cash flow, that has a lot of people it's serving, that has a lot of impact, that has a lot of followers on social media, that has a lot of programs, or all of that requires capacity. All of that requires responsibility and ownership. And that is heavier than people realize it's going to be. It is more dysregulating than people realize it's going to be. I wanted to have this conversation and really presence this for y'all because what I don't want to do is like burst your bubble. I don't want to take the wind out of your sales and go, you shouldn't be excited for when you have a bunch of clients or you have a bunch of income or you have a bunch of social media followers, you have impact, you have influence, you have power, you have authority, you're well known. I don't want to dissuade you from that. In fact, I think that would be an unkind thing to do is to be like, oh, you think you want this, but you don't. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I want to make sure a few things. One, that when you get it, you can hold it. Two, that when you get it, it's what you want. Because I have been in a similar situation in past businesses where we had the money and we had the followers and we had the responsibility and we had the brand name awareness and we had the authority in a space. And we ended up shutting all of that down and walking away from seven plus figures because it wasn't actually aligned. So the first thing that you're gonna want to do, again, starting, scaling, sustaining wherever you're at, is check your values. So if you are already holding a lot of weight, holding a lot of responsibility, and it feels overwhelming, it feels too heavy for you to hold, then somewhere in the whole process, we have a values mismatch. Because if you have clearly defined your values in business and you know what it is that you want and how you want to do business, because that's really what values are, all right? Values define how you approach business. So if you have clearly defined your values, you've defined how you do business, and you are feeling overwhelmed or overburdened by what you currently have, then we have a values mismatch because the way you're doing business is not matching the way that you want to be doing your business. Current how is not matching the ideal how. A lot of times this comes back to identity stuff. This comes back to you not actually believing what the Bible says. And I know this is a little tough to hear, but you don't believe that you are worthy of building with him and having rest and joy and peace. You don't actually believe, like in your flesh, that you can have a business that is abundant without it feeling really heavy and like a burden. You don't believe that you can have a business where you get to operate in a full alignment with your spiritual gifts and your talents. You don't believe that you are loved and that God truly wants to take care of you and that he's not going to give you abundance and then snatch it back. You don't believe that you're allowed to only work with people who hold the same values and want to do business the way that you want to do business. There is an identity mismatch. So you either haven't defined your values or you've defined them on paper and they look good. So you're like, I want to make sure that my business is rooted in, I'm gonna use some of ours, kind candor. So we tell the truth and we speak it with love. I want to make sure that my business is truly Jesus-centered and Bible-backed. I want to make sure that my business is rooted in producing good fruit. I want to make sure that my business is rooted in nervous system regulation. So everything that we do, we do with intentionality and we slow down enough that we can accurately assess and appropriately respond. Do you see how quickly those roll off of my tongue? It's because those values are things that we look at in every single decision point in our business. And so if we have somebody who's a new client come in, or we're looking at a new piece of tech, or we're looking at any of those pieces and parts, we can go, hold on, what's the Bible say? Hold on, this person that's coming in, are they asking me to lie? Or are they lying in their business? We have had past relationships that had to end because the value mismatch just got so evident that God was like, This isn't you can't keep doing this. Okay. So you want those three to five values to just so quickly roll off your tongue because you want to be practicing them every day. You want to be running every decision you make about your business through that lens. So sometimes my husband and I, we will make a choice to invest money in a place while we're like, oh, but maybe we should probably be paying this off over here. We should probably be doing this. Like the world says, practical logic says, but when we run it through our values, we're like, no, it makes sense for us to be putting the money here because this is the biblically backed, Jesus-centered, kind, candor thing to do. And we're gonna go have a conversation with the person over here and say, hey, this is why we're not doing this right now. So we're gonna make that decision and we're gonna communicate with everybody in accordance with our values. And other people may not agree with that decision, and that's okay because it's our values, not theirs. So knowing those values is so pivotal, knowing what really matters to you. And here's the best part about being in a space like this is the values I just shared with you steal them. You can't see me if you're listening to the podcast, but like quote unquote air quotes, steal the values. Because those values come from the Bible. We're gonna put God first and Jesus first, we're gonna speak truth and love, we're going to make sure that everything we do is backed by scripture. We're gonna operate in accordance with God's natural laws. So those are things that if you're a Christian business owner, like you can take those and go define them or use the words you want to use to describe them, but take them, use them. Using those values to build your foundation and to be like baked into every brick that you lay as you build your business, using those values to reassess if you have already built something and you are scaling, or you are looking at stepping out or stepping back and allowing somebody else to come in and lead, there might be some renovations that need done. There might need to be some things that get shifted. So if you realize, oh, I built an entire wall in here and there's none of my values in those bricks, then you might need to tear that wall down. And it makes it a lot easier to tear that wall down. Because if you leave that wall up and you build on top of it, guess what's gonna happen? If there's a crack in the foundation and you build on top of that and you put more weight on top of that, guess what's going to happen? You're gonna have a very expensive repair later on, and it's gonna be way messier. And I just I want to witness anyone who's hearing this and going, Oh, yeah, there's a place in my business. It's not just a wall, Lee. It's an entire floor, or it's an entire addition that I added on, or it's an entire room that I decorated. Gotta redo the whole thing. I know that stinks, that hurts, it's painful, and you being willing to do that is going to make such a difference long term. Okay. So that's the first part. The second piece is your gifts. Okay. Your God-given gifts. So next week, if you are in our free community, you will eventually get access to this once we package it as a course. And next week, if you are in the free community, you have the opportunity to do one of two things. You can either buy the Grow in Your Gifts course. And I'm going to actually have that up as a course that you can purchase this afternoon, and it'll be$55 one time. Or you can upgrade to our premium tier inside school, and it's$55 a month, and you can access all of the extra calls that come along with that. You can access like every course that we do for the months following out. So there'll be a course in April and May and June and July. Every month there'll be something for you to access live. The Grow and Your Gifts program that we are bringing forward is what God had me work on and build behind closed doors for months before I brought it to fruition. And there's a few people in school who were like our quote unquote beta testers. And I'm sharing this because you understanding your spiritual gifts as an entrepreneur is so important. And there is no other place that I have found other people doing this, where they're taking the seven gifts that Paul talks about in Romans 12, verses 6 through 8. The seven gifts that God gives us by his grace, the spiritual gifts, and applying them to entrepreneurship. I think that it is so important for us to do that because you might have taken a gifting test at church, or you might have done like your disc assessment or a Kolby assessment or a strength finder assessment or an Enneagram. You might have done some of those things, and those are helpful. And some of them have some biblically backed pieces to them, but they are not rooted in scripture. All right. And they're also a lot of times not rooted in entrepreneurship. So there's a lot of things out there that are rooted in entrepreneurship and not scripture, and there's a lot of things out there that are rooted in scripture and not entrepreneurship. This tool is designed to help you understand your gifts in the perspective of the work that you feel called to do and how you show up as an entrepreneur, how you show up as a business owner. So you understanding this is key. Now, look, you can go learn this other places. I'm not saying I'm the only person on the planet who knows how to teach this. You can go learn about your spiritual gifts and then apply them to entrepreneurship. You can go learn about entrepreneurship and apply them to your spiritual gifts. This is just a way for you to learn about it all in one place very succinctly and quickly so that you can go ahead and move on with this step. So the seven gifts, we talk through these in the free course we have inside of the school community called Discover Your Unique Spiritual Gifts. I walk through all seven in and I talk about how they are divinely designed to be used as entrepreneurs. We have the gift of the judge. The perceiver. So, this is the person who has a gift of really sensing and discerning and envisioning, like prophesying, like being able to perceive things that are outside of natural human awareness. That gift can be so valuable as an entrepreneur. And that gift can get so distorted in entrepreneurship and in our work. So the thing that we look at with all seven gifts, and I'm going to walk through the other six very quickly, so that if it piques your interest, you can either come join us in the Growing Your Gifts program next week, because it starts on Monday, or you can come into the school community and you can listen to the masterclass we have on discovering your unique spiritual gifts. Either way, your gifts can either be divinely directed or they can be distorted by the devil. All right. Your gifts can also be heightened, they can be developed, like brought to a higher, more masterful, expert level, and they can also be diminished. So when we assess your seven gifts from an entrepreneurial perspective, we look at them both from is this being used in a divinely directed way or a distorted way? And is it a gift that has been developed or has it been diminished? What I see in many entrepreneurs is that their gifts that are most strongly naturally present, there's at least one gift that has been diminished by the world instead of being developed, or there's a primary gift, like a very strong natural gifting that has been developed and it's been distorted in its use by the world. All right. So this gift of perception can get distorted and it can be diminished. There's a gift that we call the professor, the researcher. This is the one who goes and learns and just absorbs new information like a sponge and loves to connect ideas and is very logical. They love to teach, they love to give, to share wisdom, ensure that people understand how to do things from a logical perspective. There's the gift of the speaker, right? This is the person who is they talk. So yes, they're not just a teacher in the sense of like giving people information, writing, like researching, developing, understanding ideas. But this person, hi, it's me. They exhort, they encourage, they motivate. A lot of times they are speaking on stages, like they're the public speaker who is helping people move, helping people grow, helping people change. That is what that gift does. There's the gift of the CEO, and this is the leader who like they practice what they teach, they go first and model for other people what needs done. Somebody is a phenomenal CEO. If when you watch them at work all day, they are embodying leadership. If other people copied what they did, they would also be successful. If other people copied what they did, they would also be godly, they'd be righteous, they'd produce fruits of the spirit. We have the gift of the consoler. This is the person who has the heart, right? It's the compassion. It's the person who is so good as a coach, as a therapist, as a counselor. They are so good at being able to sit with somebody in their feelings and in their pain and in their emotions and support them in that state. We have the gift of administration or stewardship, and this is the gift of being able to manage assets to create plans and ensure that things are happening in a way that makes sense. These people manage things very well with this gift. And then the last gift is the gift of the taskmaster. This is the builder, this is the person who uses their hands. This is the person that is a lot of times physically talented. Yes, the scripture where this is found is Romans 12, 6 through 8. And I actually do a breakdown of this scripture in the Discover Your Unique Spiritual Gifts course that's in the school community. I do a breakdown and actually go through the Greek words that St. Paul uses in those two verses because if you just read the verses, it's not quite as rich and deep in the English translation. And that goes across multiple Bible versions. The Greek is really where you can get into the nitty-gritty of what he's saying there. So I highly suggest going and watching even just that chunk of the spiritual gifts masterclass because there's a lot in there. So those seven gifts, you understanding how those have been distorted in your entrepreneurial journey and also understanding where those may have been diminished. Our goal as kingdom-centered, Christ-centered entrepreneurs and business owners, is to develop all seven of these gifts and to use them in divinely directed ways. Because Jesus perfectly embodied all seven of these gifts. So this is what distinguishes this from every other assessment or every other like Enneagram disk assessment, all of those things is that when you go through, we call it our SAGE, our spiritual assessment of gifts for entrepreneurs, when you go through the Sage tool and you learn your measurements for each of the seven gifts in terms of distortion versus divine direction versus diminishment versus development, when you get those scores, this is something that you can take over and over. And ideally, over time, your scores are continuing to rise. The goal is as a human and in your entrepreneurship in your work is to become more gifted, more divinely gifted by his grace in all seven of these areas. Because if you're doing that, you are over time consistently becoming more like Jesus. And that's our goal as a follower of Jesus is to be more like Jesus and to show Jesus to people each and every day in our work. So you understanding your values and you understanding your gifts, if you just start with those two things, the likelihood that over time you are going to be able to build a business that can withstand more weight will be so much higher than if you never identified your values at all, and or if you never really looked at your gifts and how you could develop those in a way that God is calling you to. That's for us as humans who want to grow in Christ. When we think about this from an actual practical business perspective, and I will put another plug in here. If you are starting a business or planning to start a business, our first fruits incubator, which is our six-month-long Academy program, that starts the first week of April. That is a really great place for you to do this work, to do the values work and to do the spiritual gifts work in connection with other entrepreneurs and like in a program that has a blueprint for you to walk through the steps. That's a great place for you to do that. If you are somebody who has already started a business, like the house is built, the foundation was laid, you got rooms, you got walls, you got couches, like the house of the building is built. And you're feeling this pull to pivot or to shift or to bring God into the house, or you know that there's some cracks in the foundations that need fixed, or if you're like, I build a house that can't withstand the weight that my business is starting to have. My invitation to you would be to apply for our harvest collective, which will start in May. That's a 12-month academy program. And again, that's for people who are scaling and or trying to sustain. So in both of those programs, we walk through the values alignment and we walk through the spiritual gifting and then start applying that to all of this practical part that I'm about to talk to you about. Because if we don't start there, then whatever we build on top of that is not getting built with the Lord, it's gonna get built in vain. We're gonna labor in vain, we're gonna have anxious toil. So practically, from a business perspective, what a lot of people are taught to do, both in the brick and mortar space and in the online business space, particularly in the online business space, is to just go very quickly. Get an idea, throw together a website, get a logo, pick a product to sell, package it up as quickly as possible, and then put it out. I used to do this, so please hear me when I say this to you. There's no shame in this, there's no negative judgment to anyone who does this. And that is a very worldly way of doing business. It's a very worldly way of doing business because again, we just left out the values and the spiritual gifts. We didn't even stop and look at that. Even if we have stopped and looked at those things, oftentimes if you are trying to move very quickly, like you're trying to make a thousand dollars in 30 days, you're trying to make ten thousand dollars in 90 days, you are actually deciding on the outcomes. I wasn't planning on saying this, but it's what God's giving me. You are building without him. You are deciding on the outcomes without him. Because what if he wanted you to have a hundred thousand dollars in 90 days, but you decided on 10? What if you could have had 30 clients in 90 days, but you decided you wanted 10 in two weeks? We really want to make sure that we are pausing and praying and discerning the direction that God wants you to go. And beyond that, when God gives you an idea, He is going to give you the first step of the how. He's gonna give you the first step of the how. So, you being very intentional about listening for that, and a lot of times that step's gonna seem too small, or it's gonna seem like it's not related. He's gonna have you do things that you're like, I don't understand what this is, and the idea will come from that. The next step will be so plainly shown in that space this morning. And God was like, Go read Joel. And I was like, the whole book, it's only 10 pages, y'all. It's not like Isaiah, but he was like, Yeah, go read the whole thing. And I was like, Okay, that was so beneficial for a project that I was working on in our business. So those sorts of nudges that he gives you, a lot of times they're not gonna make sense to you, but starting there is really helpful. God's gonna give you the how. And from a practical sense, we know that you're gonna need something to sell. There's gonna need to be an offer. And that thing that you're selling, which by the way, selling is inviting somebody to say yes to something. Selling does not mean necessarily money exchanging hands. Selling means that you are offering something to someone in exchange for something else. You're inviting somebody into something in exchange for something else. So you could sell something for free in exchange for an email address. You could sell something for free in exchange for access to something. So, like our free school community, that is actually a sales process when you think about it. Because when you fill out the membership questions, I know where you're at in business. I have your email address so I can continue to contact you, and I know your biggest question. So that means that I can better serve you. I can better both help you and I can better market to you so that if there are things that we do have that are financial investments or time investments, I can better tailor those and I can better tell you about them so you can then decide if that's something that you want to exchange for. So you need something to sell, you need a place to sell it, you need a place to talk about it. And by the way, in our roots of business course, which the courses I think I have through day three done, I'm gonna have day four and five done by this week. So those will be here by Friday. Thank you for being patient with me. But in our Roots of Business course, I talk about this. You need something to sell, you need a place to sell it. So one place. So that could be a podcast, that could be a social media space, that could be a networking group, that could be a lot of different things, but you need a place to sell it, you need a way for people to purchase it. So cash, PayPal link, Zell, Cash App, Venmo. What else do we got? Stripe, square, check, wire transfer, money order. There's a lot of different ways for people to pay you, but you need to have an actual system around that. And then you need to have a way to deliver it. You figuring out all of those things first to the best of your ability. Please hear me. Unless God tells you to wait on a piece or a part. That is biblically backed business building. All right. A lot of times people will say, well, I'm just gonna put the offer out there and then see. And this is why I was really clear with y'all when I said God in that communion, like that connection time, was like, hey, just put a post out there and see if people are interested. As somebody who's built businesses before, I already knew I was gonna need to find a place to host this thing, to be able to deliver this thing. I already knew that I was gonna need a way for people to sign up for it and to sell it. And I also knew that there were available options to me and had a tentative plan, and also in my prayer life and in my discernment, had very clearly heard just wait a second, because the way in which you're gonna do this, like you haven't been given the access to that yet. I learned about school a long time ago, but I got reintroduced to school like three days after I put that video out and I went, Oh, this is perfect. This is where we're gonna host it. And I showed it to my husband first and was like, Hey, what do you think about hosting here? And he was like, This is great. So I knew enough to know I'm going to need that, and listened when God was like, It's okay for you to go ahead and move without that. If you are new to this, then again, don't ever trust my discernment over God's, don't ever trust anybody at any human's discernment over the Holy Spirit. Please, thank you. And you going ahead and having things built beforehand is going to do some really beautiful things for your nervous system. It is going to allow you to know that you've got things covered before you invite people in, that you understand the process of how things are gonna go before you have people start to come in. So you already know what's in place to help you hold the weight before the weight starts being placed on top of the foundation. And a lot of a lot of business programs, what they do is they teach you, okay, I'm gonna just give you the framework. I'm gonna give you like the blueprint or the exact way for you to build a pre-fab house. So you're gonna use this email system in order to collect emails, and you're gonna use this site to build your site, and you're gonna use this social media platform, and this is exactly what you're gonna say in your messaging, and this is exactly how you're gonna talk to people. And then when you get on sales calls, here's your scripts, and you're gonna do it exactly like this. And then when you deliver, this is what your program or your offer is gonna look like, and you're gonna do it exactly like this. And if any of you have ever been in one of those like pre-fab programs and it didn't work for you, you are not alone. The reason behind that is because those pre-fab houses and those foundations may not hold the weight of what you are trying to build. Or you may have put six bedrooms in a house that you only need two. You may have forgotten to put a basement in an area where there's tornadoes. You may have put a basement in an area that's like at sea level and is constantly flooding. So you want to make sure as you're building and you're choosing this, what you're going to sell and how you're going to sell it, and where you're going to sell it, and how people are going to purchase it and how you're going to deliver it, that you're not just going to some person who has done this before and who's here, the exact things you're going to do. Because if that process isn't also submitted to God, if God hasn't said this is the person to go learn from and do exactly what they tell you to, or if God has said, you know what, that process is great, like just run with it, then there's probably pieces and parts of that are not going to be God-led, that are not going to be aligned. The other piece to it is there might be pieces and parts of that, the way that the offer is set up, the way that you are required to market, the way that you are required to sell, the way that you are required to deliver things, make it so that you aren't able to use your own spiritual gifts or that leads you to use those gifts in a distorted way. Again, this is why those spiritual gifts are so important. This is why those values are so important is to ensure that anything you are choosing, like the website builder you are choosing, there are some people out there who are like, I love coding, I love building intricate websites, I love that, but I'm really not great at copywriting. So the actual structure of the site and the way in which we design your personal site needs to be focused on that. The marketing plan that you choose, if you don't want to be showing your face on social media, or if you don't want to be on social media, then we probably shouldn't choose a social media marketing platform. If you aren't somebody who loves to talk, that's not one of your natural gifts. It's not a gift that's just been diminished, that needs to be developed. Like it's just not something that you like doing. Like you're mediocre at it or you're pretty good at it, but it's just not, that's not where your motivation comes from. Then we probably shouldn't set up your marketing plan in a way that you have to talk all the time. Maybe you love to write. We want to make sure that the offer that you are creating, the way in which you are going to bring it to market, the way in which you are going to have people buy it, the way you're going to sell it, and the way in which you're going to deliver it, that is all in alignment with the ways in which God wants you to use your gifts. And without doing that, then that is what is going to overburden you. Because, prime example, if you build a business where you are required to be the taskmaster, where you are required to use your hands to do things all the time, and yet God has called you to use your voice, to teach, to research, to use your perception. If he has designed you to have so much more motivation and inspiration in those spaces and natural talent in those spaces, and you are down here using your hands all the time, you're going to have an issue. And I speak from personal experience with that. So you are going to be the best prepared to hold the weight of responsibility when you design your offers, your marketing, your selling, and your customer experience and your delivery process in a way where you have the most inspiration, the most excitement, the most motivation, and you have the most natural capacity. And in the ways that God is like, this is what I want you to do. The last thing I want to say about this, because this is a question that we got. Sometimes God's going to call you to do things in a way that isn't the way that you would choose. So He's actually going to give you a gift in a space that you're like, this isn't a place I'm normally gifted. I'd love to use the example of Moses where you know God meets him in the burning bush, and God says to him, like, You're going to go to Pharaoh and you're going to. Get your people released from Egypt, and you're gonna go speak to him. And Moses argues with God to the point that he's like burning with anger. And he says to God, like, I'm not a good speaker. Who am I? I you don't want me to do this. And God says, Fine, I'm gonna send you somebody who's gonna help you talk to Pharaoh, who's gonna be an intercessor for you. But guess what? Guess what's gonna happen now? You're gonna be the intercessor for me, all of your people for me. Because your people are gonna do the same thing to you that you just did to me. Your people are gonna go, we don't want to talk to God. He's scary. I don't know that I can do that. Like all of that seems really scary. So Moses ends up being the intercessor in the very same way that Moses told God, I need Aaron to be the intercessor, my brother to be the intercessor for me with Pharaoh. And I just think that's so funny. God said, Great, you're telling me you're not gifted at that. And I'm gonna give you a bunch of practice to be able to get good at that. That's gonna become your role. So God developed that talent and that gift within him because that's what was necessary for the people to escape from Egypt and to come out of slavery and then to eventually go into the promised land. So sometimes God's going to give you a supernatural ability. You might hear God tell you to start writing and you're like, but God, I'm not a writer. You might hear God telling you to start doing TikToks, and you're like, God, like, I'm not a public speaker. You might hear God start telling you to build things with your hands or do art or do paint or something, and you're like, but God, like I'm not, I'm not artistic like that. My invitation to you is to make sure that you're following those nudges because a lot of times there are skills in that, or there's people you're going to meet, or there's some reason behind it that God is calling you to it for his kingdom, for the work that you have been designed to do in his kingdom, for his kingdom. So make sure that you are not cutting yourself off from those things just because you do the sage tool and you get your gifting skills, and you're like, oh, I'm only a 35% developed in stewardship. And so if God's calling me to uh go fundraise, I don't know how to do that. I don't have skills as in as an administrator, as a manager. I'm not good with money. Okay, you might not be good at money right now, and what God is calling you to do is for you to go develop those skills so that you can be good with stewardship. So a lot of times that's why you'll miss your business ideas that God calls you to because you're like not good at that. Maybe you're supposed to be. Okay. So I think I answered all of the questions in the chat. If anyone else has anything that they'd like to ask, please go ahead and do so here. And again, invitation to join us inside Grow in Your Gifts next week. We start March 23rd. It is a 10-day program. I'll go live for an hour, Monday through Friday, for two straight weeks. There's going to be a workbook. You're going to be able to take your stage tool and go through that questionnaire on the first day and get your scores so that you can use that through the next 10 days to allow yourself to really understand your gifts as an entrepreneur better. And if you are like, okay, yes, I want to do that. And also I am ready to come into the first fruits incubator. Like I'm ready to start growing my business and I want to be in that first kickoff cohort in April. Or if you're like, I am ready to scale in a God-led way, in a biblically backed way, invitation to apply to the harvest collective. If y'all decide to join in the first fruits incubator or the harvest collective between now and the end of the growing your gifts program, like we'll credit what you paid for the growing your gifts program or what you paid to join the premium tier inside school, and we'll put that towards your first fruits or your harvest, your harvest collective payment. Okay. So just give yourself permission to start out in growing your gifts. And also if you already know, yeah, I'm ready. Let's do this. Let me go ahead. God led me here for a reason. Let's go. You can join the first fruits incubator or the harvest collective, and then you'll get access to the growing your gifts program. You'll get access to the entire premium tier of school. I hope you have a blessed week. I really hope to see you inside of Growing Your Gifts. And I'll be praying for you that you are just out there able to connect with God this week to build really strong foundations in your business, to repair any cracks, to do any renovations that need to happen so that your business can be fully aligned with Jesus and centered in truth and love. Love you all.