I am just back from Expand 2020 in Puerto Venturas, Mexico and do I have some insights and takeaways to share with you from this experience.

Last year I attended this event and came back on fire. This year...I came back with a sober mind from taking my heart to the depths.

But there is still some good stuff in all I’m sharing. On today’s episode, I’m going through my journal and insights from the event with you.

And I want to caveat this episode with the reminder that no insight can replace the experience of being in the room.

I want to emphasize for those of us behind computers: get out from behind your computer and make the investments, be in the room, have the experience.

This is the only way you can see what insights these events will bring to you.

I hope you enjoy hearing my experience, straight from my journal, and it opens something for you if you’ve been on the fence about attending an event in real life yourself.

And as always, I’d love to hear what you think and if you are attending any events (including mine! Camp Star Heart in April- link below), head on over to Instagram or Facebook to share with me!

PS- Camp Star Heart 2020 early decider pricing is still available! Camp Star Heart is like a summer camp/retreat for grown-ass women who love to take a weekend away to REMEMBER who they really are – because they know this investment of time, energy, and money – will permeate the rest of their lives and work. Our theme this year is Both/And, learn more about what all is included and get early decider pricing at http://allisoncrow.com/camp-star-heart-2020/

The post Insights from Expand 2020 appeared first on Allison Crow.

A member of my community asked me “Allison, how can I make a greater impact with my marketing to find heart-centered clients for my business?”

And my brain when straight back to the basics of client creation that I learned in the Real Estate Sales industry. And frankly, my history in RE is half of what makes me so great at creating clients now, and so I am going to bust out a few fundamentals for you here today.

Today’s show is more brass tacks- like in sports, there are some fundamentals that every player and team need to know. Lay-ups, free-throws, and rebounds before alley oops and half court shots.
We’re gonna dive into some Sales Fundamentals: And some of the language may trigger you, or may initially feel cringy to you. Take a deep breath and remember that it is your heart in all of this that matters – not the labels I’m going to use today to identify these aspects of client creation basics.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• Take inventory of the last 10-20 Paid clients you have had. Trace specifically both the source of the client and where the conversion to client was made.
  Take inventory of all the efforts (both marketing and prospecting) that you have put in over the last year. Identify what are your best sources for both exposure (increasing audience/database) and for converting clients. This can be a good exercise for helping you realize what is working.
• Open your heart and mind to learning about sales skills – perhaps take a sales skills class.
• Take a look back through all email, message, and texts..... Have you left anyone hanging? Follow up with those voice to voice conversations – even better face to face.
• Are you needy and creepy? Or are you patient, relaxed, and providing expertise and value?
• Check in with your Divine Business Manager (intuition) and ask her what guidance and advice she has for your client creation.

In this episode, I am sharing why “Breathe Y’all” is a Soulie Mantra and why you might want to take it on yourself.

Hey, hey. This is episode number 63. Hey there, soulful people. Good to be with you again today. So today, we are going to talk about what are the touchpoints behind the scenes for my Soulies. Soulies are the members of my Soulful Success coaching membership. Today, I decided that it’s really like a gym membership where you can strengthen your mind, your heart, your spirit, your brain, and a splash of your business skills at a reasonable price so that you can create better life and better work.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve kind of come up with some anchors. I’ll give you some examples of the anchor. Some of the anchors are that ... This is in no particular order. Soulies follow the path with heart. Soulies are deciders. Soulies create their own custom recipe for success with a combination of tried and true standards and individual magic. Soulies remember who they be. Soulies get an alignment and then go create. Soulies know their three, and that’s a reference to their three things in their business that work. Soulies identify their soul symptoms and their soul medicine for when things get off. We have a new one today, is that Soulies recognize, honor, and create from desire. That one came up in the coaching call today. We had a live call.

And one of them is “breathe, y’all.”

So breathe, y’all came...I didn’t realize I was saying it, but I start out every coaching session just taking a breath with my clients. I do this when I’m speaking. I like to take a breath and breathe in the oneness of the audience and the oneness of my clients. So we begin each coaching session, business, or life, or class, by just taking a few breaths together. And at some point in my little Texas voice, I was saying, “Breathe, y’all. Y’all, breathe.” My client Jody Garcia here in Georgetown, Texas, she’s a realtor, Jodie was like, “You should make a t-shirt.” And so sure enough, we made a t-shirt that says, super cute, “Breathe, y’all.” Everybody wants the t-shirt, but the only people that can get the t-shirt is not for sale. The only people that can get the t-shirt are a Soulful Success members who have been members for a year or more. They get a little baseball tee that says, “Breathe, y’all.” It’s the one that’s in the pictures of my headshot pictures.

I wanted to dive deeper today into why breathe y’all. Why breathe y’all?

I also asked my clients what did breathe y’all mean to them and posted this in our group. I said, “What does breathe y’all mean to you?”

• Tiffany says, “For me, it’s a reminder to come back to center, to the place where inner wisdom resides and be fully in this present moment.”
• Peter says, “Slow down and breathe. Love yourself first.”
• MA says, “Stop giving so much attention and energy to stuff outside of me. Breathe, go inward, and remember how strong I am.”
• For Joelle, breathe y’all means stop, check-in, and listen.
• For Sarah, breathe y’all means take a moment to notice who I am being and relax into it.
• And for Katerina, be here now present and let go of the rest.

So that phrase, breathe, y’all, has become an anchor, has become a reminder for myself in my private practice, in my personal practice, in spiritual practice, and in everyday life of the reset button. This morning in my sacred spiritual time, I started writing about breathing. Actually, even before writing about breathing, I was listening to ... I don’t even remember which one, but I was listening to one of the YouTube videos on The Way of Mastery. There was the phrase that you maybe have heard before, I know I’ve heard it before, the universe is conspiring for you. And in that video, it said the words conspire mean breathing with you. And I loved that connection to be thinking about that the universe is breathing with me. And the way I will translate that for myself and for y’all listening is that the universe is waiting for me to breathe alongside of it.

I know that when I remember to slow down and breathe that everything can shift. This is the journal entry, yes, another one, that I downloaded this morning:

Some mornings, there is a general sense of anxiety, and thank goodness for breath. My breath is my home, and sometimes it’s out of sync and other times it’s deep, and serene, and peaceful, holding me steady and secure. My breath is my heaven on earth. It is my gentle remembering that I am a spark of the divine. My breath reminds me that I am the decider and that even when I’m triggered or traumatized I can reconnect with what is really true.

Deep in through my nose, down filling my belly and lungs, slow and long out through my nose, ocean breath someone called it. Yes, like the ocean, in and out, ebb and ...

A journal entry on becoming.

This is episode number 62, and I’m in quite a bit of a reflective space this morning. It’s the first week of September. Hello, listeners. Hello, new listeners. If you’re new, let me know. Send me a message, either on social media or write a comment in a post. I have seen the numbers of the podcast go up. That feels really yummy. Definitely lessons learned in consistency.

So, this morning, I was writing in my journal about becoming, and I’ve done episodes before on becoming, and this week, I celebrate 16 years of working for myself, and so I can’t help but reflect the woman that I’ve become and some of the past of the woman that I have been over the last 16 years, and even before that. I’m going to share with you a journal entry I wrote for myself, and see where that lands us. A journal entry on becoming.

This month, I celebrate 16 years of working for myself. How did this woman who grew up Baptist and wanting to be a stay at home wife and mom with 10 kids end up working for herself? Becoming, unfolding. I was so sure of so many things 20 years ago, and life took its twists and turns, and I rode them out. Becoming, part intention and part life living me the way it wanted to.

Is it nurture or nature? I breathe into that, and it just is. “Both/And” another theme that shows up in the range and permission of both/and allowing my becoming. I am both in love with this work and personal development, and I am weary from trying so hard to grow. Grow my life, grow my business. I am becoming a woman who doesn’t try so hard and still grows. I still have goals, 333 members in Soul-Full Success, million-dollar coach with a $700,000 net, and I am so not willing to push.

I am becoming a woman who might sort of be satisfied, even delighted, by the now, loving what is. Identity, becoming both and. As soon as I decide and head in any one direction with too much force, I start to feel the stirring of the personal development world. The striving of the personal development world, instead of the being of me.

I am becoming a woman who is learning to be at ease with herself. I am becoming deep breaths and unfolding instead of to-do list and pressure to perform. I’m becoming surrender and naps and enjoyment of the coaching, the sessions I have in the here and now, versus the striving to create more. I am becoming release of the doubt that screams in my head as I write this.

Honestly, you guys, there’s a part of me that believes if I surrender into the loving what is, I will evaporate. If I try less, I will evaporate. If I allow flow instead of push, strive, achieve. I live and work in a world that sells concrete results over nurturing of our being, and after 16 years, I know that nurturing my being is actually the path to creating my results. It just doesn’t sell so well in a Facebook ad.

Here today, I’m a woman who’s different. A picture was posted online this morning by one of my coaches, Rich Litvin. It was from 2013, when I was in a group called 4PC. I was in the first cohort of that as he began to build his coaching business, and in the picture, there are two people that have passed away. One in 2015, Raphael Bejarano, and one last week, Sean Stevenson.

And in the picture, there are people that I was once really close with that I am no longer close with. There are people that I was not close with at the time that I am now close with. There are friends that I still love dearly, we just aren’t in each other’s lives every day. And at the time, that group was so together often. We were together on calls almost weekly, and we were together four times a year in person, and it was such an expanding, such a ... Both comfortable and uncomfortable space in my life.

It was one of the first times I really realized that who I surrounded myself was more important than my to-do list. When I surround myself with people that I love and don’t love, but that think deeply, that think bigly, that think both in being and achievement, that think in serving and creating, I am more likely to be nourished into becoming more of myself. I am more likely to be a woman who is in her power instead of that blob.

And seeing that picture, I realize that sometimes, as I continue to unfold and become, whether or not I want to, I want to reach back. Oh, I wish I could just go back. Which tells me that that was one of the best times in my life. And it also reminds me that we don’t stop unfolding. There is no endpoint.

I believe the teachers of the University of Santa Monica in their book, and I can’t remember the name of it right now, but they talk about the goal line and the soul line, and we are so living in a culture that is oriented around the goal line. And I, clearly, years ago, when I opened my LLC, and it’s called Soul-Full Living, just like Soul-Full Success, back in, I think, 2010, is when I opened that...

Transcription:

This is Episode #57! This is Allison Crow, and when this podcast started out, it started out as recordings from Better Life, Better Work Live that I did on Facebook. And so since I am the boss of me and the boss of my podcast, I’m going to do what feels good for me when it feels good, because I realized that’s what works in my business. So this episode is called Soulie Debrief, and I am going to be sharing a little bit of behind the scenes, what’s working, what’s not working as a soulful business owner, and I am recording this episode on a Facebook Live. So as you know, with some of my podcasts, some of them are recorded me by myself talking to my computer, and I also really enjoy doing some of these live.

Soulie Debrief. This came from a concept that I have learned from one of my mentors, Tara Newman, in a community of women leaders that I am in. And three Fridays a month, or no, two Fridays a month, we do what is called a CEO debrief, and there’s another gal in there, Rachael Cook, that has a CEO date in her business model, and I love getting together and we have various conversations. The context often changes as Tara leads us through these. Some of the questions are the same, but the context can change. Either way, doing a weekly debrief with a series of questions, and I’m not going to even get to all the questions that can be in a CEO debrief, for me, this is the Soulie Debrief today,.

I have three questions when I sit back and look over the last six, seven months and especially the last two months of business. Now I’m not going to be completely thorough in going through six months, but I am going to share, and the reason I share behind the scenes is so that you ... What’s your version, right? As you listen, as I’m asking these questions, how does it translate to your world?

I realize that I’m talking all about me and what I’m learning, but my favorite Soulies and clients and learners are able to translate when I share a personal story or personal insights, their own custom version.

The first question of my Soulie Debrief today that I want to share with you is,

“What’s not working?” I certainly have felt over the last few months some of the what’s not working. I have been focused on a whole lot of the what’s not working, but I wasn’t really clear yet, and through the last couple of weeks I have become clear.

So here is what is not working.

• Self-judgment is not working. I just spent a year with John Morgan in Creator’s Circle and my biggest takeaway from that was, “What if I didn’t judge it?” And I realize how much my self-judgment and self-criticism is taking away any peace of mind that I have. It goes against self-trust. So this doesn’t mean that I’m not a noticer. It doesn’t mean that I’m not assessing, and evaluating, and experimenting. And generally, you guys, I don’t look at myself in the mirror and tell myself I’m horrible. I don’t do a lot of self beat, and I do realize that I have been doing a lot of subconscious self-judgment. So self-judgment is not working.
• Number two: Information overload is not working. Information overload is not working. So this includes more courses, more how-to. This is where my self-judgment comes in. So for example, I am in the achievement phase of my business. I value personal growth, and I can avoid boring work, difficult emotions, by running to learn something new. Self-judgment can cause that by saying, “Oh, if you know how to do Instagram stories right, you’ll grow. You’ll get more clients if you just did this marketing thing right.” Where I tend to over-consume information is in business structure and implementation. And the fact is that I have been a successful six-plus-figure business owner for 15 years. Two of those years I did not hit six figures, and many of those years were net six figures. And so, listen, don’t compare. I use that as a metric for myself, that I feel that’s one of my metrics for success, that I’m netting 100 or plus, and so that doesn’t mean that has to be your metric, but for me that’s what feels good to sustain my life, my business, my personal standard of living. What I tend to do is, in the last week’s episode, is this place between achievement and loving what is, and what happens is my achievement tips over the line into, “I’m doing it wrong. There is something else out there. If I have or know or implement X, then everything will work.” What I have learned in all these years, 16 years of business being self-employed, 14 years of being a coach, the last 10 of those being on my own, nine of those, whatever it is, being on my own outside of a larger company, is that at this point I know exactly what t...