Grow with Soul: Ep. 110 What I Can't Talk About Anymore

Hello and welcome to episode 110 of Grow with Soul. As you all know from episode 106 on pivoting a few weeks ago, I am doing a lot behind the scenes at the moment to shift, well, pretty much everything in my business. The structure, the focus, and my own understanding of what my job role is and what I actually do. I've never done this before, but today is a short episode, sharing with you what I also shared with my newsletter subscribers last week, which is kind of an update on where my thoughts are at this moment in time, and a little bit of a pep talk too for anybody in the same sort of situation.

Here's what I talk about:

My thoughts on content creation whilst pivoting
What I just can't talk (or write) about anymore
The bigger questions that are fuelling my excitement right now
Accepting what is true, and letting go of what doesn't feel right
Where Grow with Soul is headed for the remainder of 2021
Grow With Soul: Ep. 106 - Planning A Pivot - Yours And Mine - Simple and Season Checkpoint Coaching Package

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Read the episode transcript:

As you’ll know from episode 106 on pivoting from a few weeks ago, I am doing a lot behind the scenes at the moment to try to shift pretty much everything in the business – the structure, the focus, my own understanding of what my job role is and what I actually do. I’ve never done this before, but today is a short episode sharing with you what I shared with my newsletter subscribers last week, updating about where my thoughts are at this moment in time.

Here’s the thing with me – when there’s something on my mind I just can’t talk about other things as if nothing’s going on. I find it impossible to carry on as normal, to churn out normal blog posts and normal podcasts when there is this great big elephant crowding my brain. It would possibly be better business to suck it up and keep producing while I figure things out but that’s just something I’m not able to do – and also that I don’t want to do. I don’t want to be producing content I’m not passionate about just to hit some arbitrary “visibility” metric.

So the truth is, I can’t talk about marketing anymore. I can’t talk about business building anymore. I can’t talk about how to do this or that, I can’t talk about sales or strategy, I can’t talk about how to grow.

Ok, a caveat. I can converse about marketing. I can happily chat away to coaching clients and business friends about marketing. I just can’t monologue about it. I can’t write about it.

And I really can’t write about it. I have tried to phone it in, tried to sit down to write podcasts about marketing rules or seasons of business and I just…can’t. It’s like my brain has closed that part of itself down and I no longer have anything to say on those topics. It’s been wrung out and there’s nothing left.

I have known for a long time that I wasn’t as excited about talking about marketing anymore, that what was coming up with clients and in my own life was this emotional experience of running a business – the bigger questions of “what do I really want?”, “where am I going?”, “how can I do this in the healthiest, most fulfilling way?”. That was where I felt excited, and that was where I felt the impact.

Talking about marketing and business was the right thing, until it wasn’t. I know I’ve held guilt about how it should be what I continue to do because it’s what people expect and want from me. It has been process of coming to terms with the knowing that has existed inside me for many months, bobbing closer on the tide to accepting what is true now and letting go of what is fine but not right.

Back in March I was driving up to Bangor for my hospital appointment and as I went round the bend by the field with the horses a phrase popped into my brain: redirecting ambition into a life worth living. I’ve not really been able to shake it off. That has been the object of my own life and work since my burnout in early 2019, although I don’t think I really knew it; finding a way to take the ambition that has driven and defined me my whole life and turning it away from outside expectations and toward internal fulfilment.

That’s what I’m excited to talk about. To explore what it means to live a worth living, how our work fits into that, unravelling beliefs and conditioning, choosing ourselves. To not have the answers or the how to’s but to ask the questions and hold the space and give the permission.

In reality much of what I write here won’t change, and a lot of what I write on the blog won’t change. After the summer the podcast will shift away from marketing and coaching episodes and more into deeper conversations about how our work and lives can exist more peacefully. From the end of this year, most of my current product offerings will be retired and replaced with new things that are really no more than a twinkle in my eye at this point.

When I sent this email, I had lots of responses from people who felt the same in their own businesses. I personally have found this to be a phenomenon of post-pandemic work and life – for many people I work with the last eighteen months has forced dissatisfaction to the surface. It may be that the old goals you were chasing now feel meaningless, or at least not really you anymore. It may be that you can no longer unknow the realisation that you don’t actually like what you do anymore. It may be that you’ve only been talking about the things you’ve been talking about because the rules of marketing say that’s what you have to talk about – and you don’t want to do what you have to anymore.

I know this uncertainty is frustrating at best and terrifying at worst, but I do think it’s a good thing. We’ve had so many years of following the rules and trying to find a way to show up that feels like us whilst still within the template of what is “right”. I think more people saying “these are the things I want to talk about and it might not make strategic sense but it’s how I exist as a whole person” can only be a good thing. We need more difference, more permission, more questioning, more people stepping into the fullness of their truth.

So if you are one of the people who listens to this and thinks “I can’t talk about ___ anymore either”, I just want to say it’s ok. I can’t give you any answers because we’re going into somewhat uncharted waters. For me it took time to come to acceptance that I couldn’t talk about this anymore, and even longer to embrace the idea that I could actually stop. Go easy with yourself, but keep following that golden thread of excitement. You can never go wrong if you do what’s true.