How to make your customers love you & your online program

SHOW NOTES:

Interview with Dr. Carolyn Elliott

https://thedirtyalchemy.simplecast.com/episodes/interview-with-carolyn-elliott

LET'S STAY IN TOUCH!

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi guys. Today we’re talking about something that’s a little counterintuitive... doing things that don’t feel good for the success of your business.

It happens to be a few days before Halloween, so it feels appropriate to have today’s topic be Poison. And it also happens to be Scorpio season, so it feels particularly appropriate to have today’s topic be Poison as Medicine.

If you’re a business owner you probably already know that doing things you don’t want to do is apart of building & growing a profitable business. Because there will always be parts of your business you’re resistant to because you’re scared. Maybe you’re really nervous about increasing your prices because part of you thinks you still don’t deserve to get paid. Or you hate posting on social media because you’re nervous about opening yourself up to negative comments (or maybe worse... crickets on the other end in response to all the hard work you put on or creative artistry you feel you created). Or any number of other things.

But these things you’re resisting doing in your business... they’re about so much more than just “I don’t feel like it.” They’re about deep insecurities and worries you have. And when you ignore that when they come up... you’re going to stay trapped in the patterns that are limiting you and preventing you from the goals you set.

In spiritual communities, there’s a lot of people who talk about the importance of feeling good. Being high vibe all the time, thinking positive thoughts. Because if you don’t, you’re going to attract bad things into your life. In this mindset, one second of negative thoughts can derail all the work you’ve been putting in for years on yourself and your business.

“Oh no! You just thought about the debt that you currently have. Quick, start thinking about making millions of dollars, because even a second of thinking about your debt will attract more of it.”

So... this is obviously bullshit. On a very practical level, we need to face our problems in order to move through them, resolve them, and come to a resolution. I mean, if you refuse to think about your debt, you’re probably not taking any steps to pay it off, either.

And on a spiritual level, if we just Band-Aid our problems with affirmations about “positivity” and “good vibes only” (which we might not actually feel on a deep level, and so magically we are not putting our full energy behind it anyway), then we’re pretty much standing in a pile of shit, staring up at the sun and wondering why everything smells bad. That negative thing is going to stick around because we never took care of it, we just pretended it wasn’t happening.

Okay I’m being a little black or white here. Maybe the shit you’re standing in would wash away with the rain or be eaten by a bunch of small dogs, but a much much faster way, is to just clean it up yourself. Or feed it to your garden. Or at least take a few steps to the side.

This is where the concept of poison as medicine comes in.

At the right dosage, any poison can become medicine. And at the wrong dosage, any medicine can become poison. That’s why you can overdose on medicine that’s supposed to help you.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this: Pharmakon. Plato used it to talk about things that could be used as a cure or as poison... the answer, of course, is how we choose to use it. But if this idea stretches far enough back that Plato had something to say about it... you better believe there’s some real magical energy behind it.

For many of us, when it comes to the growth of our business and ourselves, Pharmakon plays out like this: our biggest traumas can actually become our biggest assets. In other words, our wounds can become our wealth (as the lovely Dr. Carolyn Elliott says. Which if you haven’t listened to our interview with her on the podcast, I’ll link it in the show notes).

This might be hard to believe at first, and it might even seem shocking to say out loud. Wait, what?? We’re supposed to acknowledge those scary and painful things that we hate thinking about?? But this is actually the only way to solve them. The same way that if you don’t talk about something in therapy that is deeply troublin...