Time for Growth

Here in the northern hemisphere, the wild and unruly growth of Spring and early Summer has passed. The grass in my backyard doesn’t need to be cut very often anymore and the weeds have grown lacklustre in their efforts to take over the property. It’s harvest season, and, though I’m not much of a gardener (I’d rather build something for my backyard than plant something), I’m happy to see the farmers’ market full of abundance from other people’s fields.

In my business, though, it seems to be a different season. I’m heading into Spring, planting seeds, preparing the soil, and gathering up the tools and resources I’ll need for a busy season of growth. 

I’ve known for awhile that the next level of growth and (more significantly) investment in that growth would be coming, but I did my best to resist it. On the more “simple” side of things, my website has been in need of a major overhaul for quite some time. (Krista, my business manager, keeps reminding me of how much more functional my shopping cart could be, for example.) Also, I’ve been working on a book on holding space for a few years now, and it really needs to move from “draft” to “published”. And, to support it all, I need to improve the accounting system that was good enough for a little one-woman shop but is stretched to capacity (and, frankly, was never very good in the first place, due to my lack of financial expertise).

On the more “complex” side of things (at least for me it feels complex), an increasing number of people have been asking for some version of a license, so that they can teach my Holding Space content within their organizations or from their consultancy practices. (I’m currently working with an adult learning organization, for example, that is embedding it into the training they offer educators, facilitators and tutors.) In addition, I feel the need to do more Train the Trainer programming so that my Holding Space Practitioner Program can continue to grow beyond my capacity to teach it (especially as my travel increases).

Why did I resist all of that? There were a lot of reasons and it’s hard to narrow down just one or two. For one thing, it’s a lot of WORK to shepherd a business through that kind of growth and it requires SKILLS that aren’t among my strengths. It also costs a lot of MONEY and involves a significant amount of RISK. All of that brings up a lot of fear and doubt and tired old stories about how I’m “not really a business-woman” and “I shouldn’t reach for too much”.

Back in the Spring, when I was worn out from a few big trips and a fair bit of emotionally exhausting work, I was overwhelmed and a little discouraged and I wondered if it was all worth it. The idea of growth, at that time, seemed far beyond what I had the energy to imagine.

Couldn’t I just stay this size and putter along at the pace I’d already established? Would it be so bad if my business didn’t grow? Plenty of people stay in intentionally small businesses with folksy websites and cobbled together accounting systems – couldn’t I be one of them?

Over the Summer, after I’d rested awhile and my head was a little clearer, I decided to give space to those questions and to spend some time discerning what my relationship with growth would be and what growth would require of me.

Here are some of the things I’ve been asking myself during this time:

  • Is the growth of my business a healthy and necessary thing, or is it simply tied to a capitalist culture that has us all conditioned to believe that the only good business is a growing business?
  • What is enough? Am I satisfied with this comfortable life that affords me a comfortable home and enough extra to take my daughters on a modest vacation once a year?
  • ON THE OTHER HAND… and this is a big one… is this really about MY growth (and – by extension – my business) or is it about the growth of this WORK? If I limit the amount I choose to grow, am I limiting how much this valuable work (that I have the honour of stewarding) can grow?
  • If I believe that this work is a calling and not just an occupation (and I do), shouldn’t I show up in the best and boldest way that I know how to steward it into the world? And shouldn’t I keep growing the community that can steward it with me?
  • What does it look like if I trust the WORK to guide me (and, by extension, the community that gathers for that work) rather than the other way around? AND/OR… what is a healthy way for us to be in interdependent relationship?
  • If the work grows, can I continue to do it in the way that I love – rooted in genuine relationships/community and hosted in reasonably-sized circles? What variation of that style can be adapted to a more expanded audience?
  • If it’s about the WORK and not about me, what do I need to do to work through my personal limitations and blocks so that the work can thrive? And who are the people who can help me work through them and build the structures needed to support them?

It’s been a healthy and worthwhile process to go through. I didn’t do it in a traditional business planning way, though. (You can wipe any pictures of spreadsheets, planning software, or even sticky notes out of your mind.) I did it while wielding power tools in my backyard. Not only did the process of building furniture with wood inspire my metaphor-loving mind, but the hands-on nature of it helped me shift out of over-thinking mode and break some of the old patterns deeply rooted in my brain.

Instead of relying on my mind alone to find a path through all of this complexity (which is one of my patterns), I let my body and heart help me find the way. My mind would most certainly have gotten stuck in old stories of scarcity, unworthiness, fear, ego, limitation, etc. while my body reminded me “You love building, so just keep building until it feels like the right time to stop!”

At the end of the summer, I feel relaxed, happy and energized to do the next right thing that this work is asking of me. That next right thing appears to be investing in a structure that will support growth, and to do so with integrity and with my values intact.

After all of that reflection, these things feel true:

  • I am not interested in growth just for the sake of growth, but I AM interested in helping more people learn about the beauty of holding space.
  • I value community and relationships, so I will continue to grow this work in ways that foster opportunities for deep connections and meaningful conversations.
  • I will continue to hold true to my authenticity and integrity and will not grow this work simply to feed my ego or bank account. If the work changes me in ways that don’t feel authentic, I will hit the pause button until I can return to alignment.
  • Success for me will equal success for my extended community. If, for example, my financial resources grow, then I will be better able to support other women in business, to pay people well when they work for me, to give people scholarships for my workshops, and to fund the growth of the school in Uganda.
  • While I love the work and will continue to serve it to the best of my ability, I won’t jeopardize what/who I hold most dear. If/when necessary, I will put my family and closest friends first. I will also prioritize my own wellbeing and self-care.

One of the great benefits of putting community at the centre of my business model is that the moment I decided I was ready to dive into this new phase, I realized that many of the skills required already exist within my community (or one step removed). I’ve spent the last week in lovely, open-hearted conversations with people who believe in the work that I do and who have expertise that I don’t have (ie. developing a licensing model, setting up an accounting system, managing the details, designing a website, publishing a book, etc.). It reminds me that business development can be rooted in joy, love and community and doesn’t have to burdensome or boxy or involve boardroom tables or powerpoint presentations.

Sure, I still have moments of fear and doubt, but I feel remarkably supported, resourced, and ready.

And you, my friends, who read this newsletter/blog… you too are in this community, supporting the growth of this work. I couldn’t do it without you reading what I write, showing up at my workshops and retreats, inviting me to speak and teach, and offering encouragement and love. I am deeply humbled by the many ways that you continue to show up. A deep bow of gratitude to you!

Some time in the next few months, I expect I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the publishing of the book on holding space (because every step of this process requires a financial investment) and I trust that when the moment is right, the community will show up as you always have.

Peace to you, my friends. May you lean into your own seasons of growth whenever it is right for you.

What I want to tell you about having work that goes viral

IMG_6148

In recent weeks, I’ve had a few people whose work is growing and who want to be prepared for more growth ask me what advice I’d give them from my experience of having a blog post go viral. A year and a half ago, my blog post about holding space went viral. So many people visited that my website crashed once and threatened to crash another time. There continue to be viral spikes now and then when someone with a large following discovers and shares it. By now, I would estimate that around 3 million people have seen that post either on my site or on other sites where it’s been shared (especially Uplift Connect). It’s been quoted in books and journals, it’s inspired videos and other articles, and it’s been plagiarized more than once.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that experience and what I learned from it. It really was life-changing and it’s taken my work into a deeper and more focused place. It has opened remarkable doorways for me, brought in lots of new clients and speaking engagements, and allowed me to travel to some interesting places to do interesting work. Now, a year and a half later, I’m working with an agent to grow the ideas that started in that blog post into a full-length book.

Yes, that post has been a great blessing and a dream come true, but it has required great sacrifice of me as well. The fall-out from that post has brought me to the brink of burnout more than once. It has exhausted and overwhelmed me. It has changed relationships and has sent me into therapy. It has placed a burden on my shoulders that I wasn’t always prepared to carry. Sometimes hundreds of emails fill my in-box, each one of them a request for some energetic output on my part.

At first I was going to write a “what I wish I’d known before it happened” kind of post, but truthfully, I don’t know if I would have done much differently. Even in the really hard spots, there were lessons to learn that couldn’t have been learned without some struggle. So instead, I will give you some of my stories and lessons and you can make of them what you will. Some of these are related to business growth and some are related to personal growth – I really can’t separate the two because they are so blended in what I do.

    1. There are few things more vital than good support. Because my business hadn’t grown enough, I was running a one-woman show before my post went viral, doing everything on a shoestring budget. I didn’t have a good hosting plan for my website and I didn’t have anyone with the technical capacity to support website challenges. I was self-taught and relied on the inexpensive hosting package of a big and impersonal business. That was a nearly fatal flaw. When the traffic increased exponentially, the big and impersonal business kept threatening me with menacing emails about the fact that I didn’t have enough capacity in my hosting package, but weren’t responding to any of my requests for support. When my website crashed, they completely ignored my repeated requests for urgent support for more than 24 hours. Finally, a website super girl stepped forward, stayed up all night, and rescued my site from disaster. It was running again (now hosted by her) by the time I woke up in the morning. I now pay a fair bit more for web hosting, but that’s a monthly bill I pay quite happily for the peace of mind it’s brought me.
    2. Having a lot of good content and programs already available helped immensely. I’ve been blogging for more than a dozen years and had several reasonably-priced programs available on my site (ie. Mandala Discovery, The Spiral Path, and Lead with Your Wild Heart) which meant that new visitors could engage with my work and invest in it right away. I know I could have done better if I’d had a savvy marketer working with me, but I did alright, given the circumstances. I am grateful that the viral spike happened far enough into my business development that I could support it and it wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan success. That meant that, in the early days when not many people were showing up, I had to be faithful to the work and believe that it had meaning, continuously creating whether or not people were paying attention.
    3. The internet has created a market where people feel they are entitled to free content and advice. While I am grateful for the income that this post brought in, it is also true that far more people came looking for free support. This is not a critique of those people (I’ve done the same thing myself on occasion, though I try not to anymore), but it was amazing to me how many people reached out for free advice on everything from parenting to palliative care to marriage to business development. Because I love to engage with people and have built many beautiful relationships online, my first instinct was to respond to every one of the emails I received and often that meant giving out free advice.  That is exhausting and unsustainable. I had to learn how to create better boundaries for myself and I had to practice letting people down for the sake of my own health and well-being. Now, a year and a half later, I have finally hired an assistant who is managing that flow and helping me to protect my energy.
    4. I can’t over-state how important good self-care and healthy boundaries are. I’ve always considered myself to be fairly good at self-care (I take lots of hot baths, go on lots of long walks, step away from my work regularly, journal and make art often, have some really supportive relationships, etc.) but I realized with this experience that the bigger my work and audience gets, the more intentional I need to be about self-care and boundaries. In working with a therapist, for example, I realized that I still have a long way to go in terms of honouring my body and protecting my energy while I make myself available to more and more people. I’ve been working on that this summer.
    5. People are looking for more depth than we sometimes expect – don’t dumb it down. I work in some pretty deep and sometimes dark places. I talk about grief, shadow, conflict, race relations, vulnerability, etc. That’s not the kind of work that one would normally associate with “going viral”. And yet, I’ve found that my audience shows up when I take the most risks in going to those deep places. My blog post started with the death of my mother and it included a definition of holding space that is fairly intense and doesn’t fit with some of the more New-Agey or Law-of-Attraction type understanding of holding space. And yet, that is clearly what people are hungry for, because they keep coming. Far too many coaches and writers write from a more shallow place (“do these ten steps and you’ll have a rich and happy life”) and they might get rich from it, but I don’t think it’s feeding the real hunger in the world.
    6. Fame is shallow. It’s the real work that matters. Sure it’s flattering that three million people have seen my post, but I can’t dwell in abstract numbers or I risk getting lost in ego. To me, the real work is in the circles that gather in my workshops, the individuals who sit across from me in my coaching sessions, or the people who engage with me when I speak at conferences. Last week, I held space for a powerful and intense ceremony for two people who are launching a beautiful new movement into the world. Sitting there in the grass, bearing witness as they took a metaphorical journey into the work that calls them was as good as my work gets and it is a great privilege that I get to do it. I don’t ever want to forget that.
    7. Not every audience is worth spending my energy on. At the beginning, it was flattering to be invited to do radio interviews, etc., but I learned fairly quickly that if my gut was telling me it wasn’t the right audience, I should pay attention. More than one interview fell flat because the interviewer really didn’t understand my work and didn’t know how to ask good questions. I walked away from those interviews feeling drained and frustrated. Since then, I’ve been more selective in what speaking engagements or interviews I’ll agree to. I’ve also become somewhat suspect of online summits where a lot of speakers are doing free webinars, especially when there has been little thought to the diversity of the speakers. I would only agree to one of those if it was just the right invitation and just the right intention around what it’s offering. It’s not true that “all PR is good PR” – sometimes it drains your valuable energy and/or links you to products and organizations that don’t fit with your values and integrity.
    8. There are great risks involved in taking your work to a deeper place. There’s a Bible verse that says “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” That rings true for me in this work. I feel that I have been given a great gift and great responsibility in doing this work, but it is also requiring much of me and I can’t take that lightly. In order for me to be doing this work with integrity, I have to be willing to peer into my shadow and address my own shame and discomfort. Some of the emails I get, for example, are negative and attacking. Sometimes I need to ignore them and stand in my strength, but sometimes I need to accept what is truthful in them. And always I need to be resilient enough to return to the work and remember that it’s not about me.
    9. It is, ironically, harder to build real relationships when lots of people know who you are. This was rather unexpected for me, but I’ve noticed that people respond to me differently once they know that I had a blog post that went viral. When I’m at conferences or other public gatherings where people know my work, they assume I’m the expert or teacher and they approach me that way, assuming I know something that they don’t know. Some have read a fair bit of my work already, so I am automatically at a disadvantage, not knowing anything about them. It’s new territory to navigate, and it hasn’t kept me from some beautiful experiences of deep connection, but it definitely shifts the initial connection in a relationship. Sometimes this is okay (it allows me to maintain some boundaries), but sometimes it leaves me feeling a little lonely when everyone else is connecting on more equal playing field. I remember a similar thing happening when I first stepped into management – I was no longer privy to much of the office chit-chat that helped build relationships among staff.
    10. Only do this work if you’re prepared to have your life shaken up. One of the most significant results of this deeper personal work that cracked open for me when I started writing about holding space was that my 22 year marriage unraveled only months after my post first went viral. That wasn’t accidental timing. The post, and my resulting work, caused me to see that I wasn’t living in integrity. While I was busy teaching people to hold space, I was in a marriage where neither I nor my husband knew how to hold space for each other. We were pretending we did, but we really didn’t, even after years of trying. The viral blog post made that even more apparent, when I started looking for deeper emotional support than he knew how to give. I knew that, in order for this work to grow, I had to be honest with myself and step away and also release him to what would support him better.
    11. The outcome is not my responsibility. This has been my mantra since the early days of my business when I was stressing out about whether anyone would read my blog or pay for my offerings. After the discouragement of canceled workshops (due to low registrations) and ignored blog posts, I had to remind myself that I am called to this work and will continue to do it whether three people show up or three million. I am responsible for showing up and doing this work with integrity and commitment, but I am not responsible for the numbers or what people take from it. When I get caught up in numbers or people’s responses, it messes with my ego, my work suffers and my voice gets weak. When I stay in the work and write and teach what I’m most passionate about, the right people show up and I get to do beautiful, meaningful work.
    12. Nothing is worth more than my own family and health. This work is gratifying and humbling and I breathe a prayer of thanksgiving every day that I get to do it. But no matter how many people visit my blog or come to my workshops, I would walk away from it all if that sacrifice were ever required of me for the sake of my daughters or myself. There are only so many balls that a person can juggle, and I know which ones are glass. I love this work, but I am not a slave to it.

    If this resonates with you, please share it with anyone whose work may be growing. I often wondered, while I was in the middle of it, where to turn for help and support from someone who’d been there before me. I found some of that support along the way and I want to offer it to others. If you’re growing your work and need coaching to help you stay grounded, check out my coaching page. If you’re just beginning to dream of what your work is in the world, you may benefit from Pathfinder: A Creative Journal for Finding Your Way or The Spiral Path: A Woman’s Journey to Herself.

    Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my bi-weekly reflections.

    Pin It on Pinterest