Ep. 34. Tapping into the Play State for more Purpose and Progress

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today’s episode. [00:00:48] I am so fired up to talk to you about the place state today and how it helps you to create a lot more simple progress. It creates that momentum month after month that you want in your business. It also will help you to increase your revenue because of how it helps you to market and sell and build trust and collaborate with other humans and how it helps you to feel that sense of purpose and fulfillment that you really want in your work. [00:01:23] It is like the trifecta. It helps you to accomplish all three of these things, which is why I love this tool so much. It is accessible to every single entrepreneur, no matter which stage they are at. As long as they have a simple skillset to know how to tap into the place date throughout their workday. This topic has become one of the things I’m most passionate to talk to founders about and to teach them about. Today I don’t have time to go into all of my tools and all of my thoughts, but I thought it would be really great to at least introduce you to my thinking around this and introduce you to some tools that you can use just to get started. Of course, this is something that is inside of my 21 day nervous system reset course for founders. It’s actually on sale right now, just for the month of January. I thought it would be really great to give everybody access to this at the beginning of the year. It’s such a wonderful time to work on yourself, invest in yourself, become a more effective founder at the beginning of the year. [00:02:28] It will be, I promise, a very transformational experience that will help you to step into your CEO shoes to go bigger and bolder, but to do so in a way that works for you, on your terms that doesn’t feel like ramping up speed and stress, but feels like bringing more ease and more clarity and more confidence into your business as you actually grow it throughout the year. So check out the show notes for that 21 day reset. You only have the remainder of this week to take advantage of that sale. [00:03:04] So let’s dive into all things the play state, for founders specifically. We’re going to be talking about how to use this in terms of actually growing your business. I know a lot of you have probably heard of getting into a place state or getting into a flow state before. Maybe you’ve actually experienced it and you know how amazing it feels. [00:03:28] And you’re wondering how you can create more of that in your business. But instead of just talking about how lovely the place state feels, I want to give you a really robust understanding of actually what it is, why it’s important, why it’s strategic and how you can actually create eat it so that you are more effective as a founder. [00:03:50] So of course it feels nice, but I want to talk to you. About why it actually matters for business growth, why it actually matters for sustainable progress month after month. [00:04:01] So the place state or sometimes called the flow state in some people’s vocabulary. It’s a state of the nervous system. So that’s the first thing that I want you to understand is that this conversation today, Is about taking a scientific look at what is actually happening. In your biological body and your brain, body system, what’s happening with the Vegas nerve and what branch of the Vegas nerve you’re actually operating in [00:04:36] So the play state is something that we can actually measure. When a researcher or neuroscientist is looking at someone’s particular body and particular nervous system. And really studying how their Vegas nerve is interacting to their surroundings. Now humans have been the same since, you know, since we’ve been around. [00:05:01] And so the place stayed and the way that our nervous systems work has always been this way. Although we haven’t had the scientific research and scientific terminology and ways of measuring it up until quite recently [00:05:17] and so in the past, this has really been, I would say, hijacked by the spiritual community. And not because of anything bad that they’re doing on their part. It’s just that when you are in these regulated nervous system states, Like stillness, ventral vehicle and a play. [00:05:40] You clear a lot of the busy-ness of your mind. You clear the anxious thoughts, the cluttered thoughts, the spinning thoughts, the analysis paralysis. You basically empty out the cop web so that you can see and hear and feel what’s always been there the whole time. Right? It’s kind of like when you’re walking through the forest, and you’re ruminating on something and you’re thinking about something and you’re stressed out and then someone says, stop. And you slow down and you listen and use your senses to connect with the noises and the stillness of the forest. Suddenly things change in your mind, things change in your body, your whole perspective changes, and that’s when you can have this sense of connectedness and you can actually hear from God and have a lot of wisdom that was there all the time, that now you can connect with. So the reason I’m saying this, because don’t worry, I promise we’re going to get to the business tie in here, but the reason why I’m starting this episode with saying this is because I think a lot of founders are maybe holding back from using some of the tools that will help you to actually regulate yourself and get into a play state or a flow state because they think that they have to become a Buddhist and meditate or go to some sort of sound therapy or sound bathing thing that just feels very woo, very new age, very not in line with their value system. So what I want to say is, is that getting into the regulated nervous system has nothing to do with a new age or Eastern religion, although, these religions have always used different rituals and different traditions in order to help people to get out of fight or flight. But whatever your religious tradition is, whatever your belief system is, you, your church, your temple, whatever, probably uses nervous system regulation tools as well, like prayer, like singing, like co-regulating with other humans in order to do this as well. So I would just invite you to let go of any type of box. You want to put this in and let’s just look at this from a very scientific matter of fact way, today. Let’s talk about how you can use it in your business, and let’s not bring in any type of outside connection to some spiritual ancient practice that someone else might be using. [00:08:25] At the do business better school and on this podcast, [00:08:30] we don’t teach manifestation anything, woo woo or spiritual because [00:08:35] we want to teach you the basic science that is inclusive of all beliefs. We want to teach you body up somatic movements that any physiotherapists would, use that are accessible and available and safe for everyone and then you can put your belief system on top of that and use these tools in order to enhance your life, your spirituality, your business, whatever. What I love about our approach is that these tools will help you grow your business. So they just have so many great side effects. That’s why we often say grow your income and your impact without sacrificing your personal life and wellbeing, because these tools will grow your impact, grow your income, help you with your personal life and wellbeing all at the same time. So that’s what we’re doing today and we’re going to talk specifically about the place state. So the play state is part of what I call the founder peak performance zone. Okay. These are the three nervous system states where your body is regulated and feeling safe. These states have the peak performance zone for founders are stillness, ventral vehicle and play. Now don’t be scared off by that and all that scientific terminology. It’s really simple to understand and it’s something that I break down in about three minutes inside of the 21 day nervous system reset. But play is one of the states inside this peak performance zone. And the reason why we call it the peak performance zone is because when you are in these three states, it means that your body is registering safety. It means that your Vegas nerve is using the ventral vagal branch primarily of the vagus nerve. Where your body is Optum, optimally functioning. It means that your hormonal makeup is really working in the way it’s supposed to be. [00:10:32] You don’t have access adrenaline and cortisol rushing through the system. It means that your immune function is how it should be. So you don’t have an immune response that’s triggered, so you don’t have as much auto-immune happening. It means that you digest your food well, because you’re not running from a barrier, you’re able to digest your food. It means that your hearing is optimized because the inner ear muscles are orienting toward human voice and not toward predator noises. And it means that you have full access to the prefrontal cortex. So instead of your amygdala firing and sending all of your resources to your limbs, so you can fight off a threat. [00:11:15] You’re able to use the computer called your prefrontal cortex in your brain to create and innovate and problem solve and do math and think through your strategies and stay objective. When you are not in these three states. And you go into dysregulation and we can kind of describe that simply here on the podcast as a fight flight or freeze, although there’s, you know, more nuances. [00:11:43] There’s actually six other states that you can go into when you’re in dysregulation. But when you’re in this dysregulation, it’s basically when your primal parts of your body. The primal parts of your nervous system, like the amygdala fire, because your brain body system is registering threat. And so your body has to orient itself toward fighting off a threat, not thriving, not growing a business. So it will, you know, turn off access to the prefrontal cortex. It’ll mess up digestion, mess up hormones, mess up your immune response and it will change the way you think and it will create a lot of clutter. In your business strategies. [00:12:31] So I want you to imagine that there are two founders sitting across from each other at the same table. And they look fine, but one is actually grounded and regulated and in a place state. And the other one, even though she doesn’t know it is in fight or flight. If we had told these two entrepreneurs. I want you to make an action plan, a strategy for your business for the next 90 days. And they both, let’s just say they’re like the boat, both the same founders, same education, same brainpower, same industry, same circumstances. Let’s just pretend we could clone them and then just change only the nervous system state. Of these two founders. What would their ideas and action plans and strategies look like if they wrote them down, they would be completely different. First of all, the founder in fight or flight and accessing that sympathetic nervous system where adrenaline and cortisol are rushing through the system, and blood and energy and resources are moving away from the prefrontal cortex and away from the core part of the body to the limbs to fight it all. That person’s strategy would be filled with a lot more actions, a lot more things to do, a lot more ideas. That founder would be talking faster. That founder would have a sense of urgency. They would have more fear based thinking they would notice more threats because when you’re in this state, you actually become hypervigilant and just scanning your horizon for threats. So their action plan would be compensating for these hypothetical threats. They would most likely over use resources or lean into working more hours or working with more speed in order to compensate. To try to quote unquote succeed. We’re going to have a lot more complexity, unnecessary complexity in that founder’s plan, then the founder that was in the play state. The founder that was in the police state would have a much more streamlined strategy, way less actions, and would feel really grounded and clear in what they needed to do. They would feel a lot more like, yep. We can do this. They would actually be able not only to create a more simple plan, but execute it faster than the other one because of how clear their brain was. So they would not be spinning in their mind and analysis paralysis or second guessing decisions. They would just go and do and they would only do the needle moving items. This is what happens when you’re regulated and especially when you’re in the play state. Founders in fight or flight, don’t actually realize it because, of course, it changes your thinking. You think that all of these things are necessary. You think that you need to do all this stuff. You think that you don’t have enough time? You think you need to be, you know, on all the time and you think the fact that your business brain is like spinning all the time, it feels strategic cause you’re like, oh yeah, I’m just thinking through everything. I’m on top of everything, you know? And they sometimes call it their personality. There’s just like access adrenaline in the system. It not only depletes your adrenals and it has a lot of negative health effects on you, you will burn out physically if you run your business like this for years. You’re not actually as smart as you think you are because we know from scientific research, you’re not accessing the prefrontal effectively when you’re in this state. So we want to be accessing the founder of peak performance zone, especially the play state, because it will change the way your brain operates. It will up level your thinking. You’ll become a smarter CEO just by doing this. You don’t have to go get an MBA. You don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to go to another accelerator and learn how to be a business person or learn how to market herself. You literally can just make sure that your body doesn’t think you’re running from a bear every day and then you’ll be a lot better off. [00:16:50] Okay. So that’s why this is important. Now the other thing I will say quickly before we move on to how we get into the place date. Is that the place state will also help you to stay more up objective and to create a lot more motivation, inner motivation and our fun for actually going out there and taking action and testing and tweaking over time. [00:17:19] The play state is absolutely one of the most strategic states that you can market and sell in, because it will give you the fuel you need for the journey. I’ve just testing and trying and tweaking and it will give you the nervous system state that you need in order to co-regulate with other humans. [00:17:41] So you probably have heard many times, and in other settings that mammals are social creatures. We need each other in order to thrive and actually survive. If you put you know, humans in isolation, we die. Our biology does not operate optimally and we eventually will decline and decay. We need each other. And we don’t just need the absence of threat. We need the presence of safety. That’s really important when we talk about sales and marketing, because your customers need to feel safe. When you’re talking to them and they need. I feel to feel safe, to move forward with your product. But you also need to feel safe in order to help them to feel safe. So when you market. If we can get you into the place state. Around talking about your product and talking about your services and talking about pricing and talking about, you know, all of it, no matter who you’re in front of that will subconsciously you know, your customer doesn’t know it, but they just feel good. [00:18:47] They just feel certain and confident to do business with you. And that’s because of how the vagus nerve changes the muscles of the face and the inner ear to send signals of safety to other humans. And it also has to do with mirror neurons. And so it’s so fun because you don’t, again, have to become an expert salesperson in order to start improving your selling. You just have to know how to send signals of safety to other people using your basic primal biology. Nothing, no tricks in, you know, hacks and nothing like that. Just knowing how to keep yourself out of dysregulation. [00:19:28] I hope by now you kind of understand why this is a good idea. It will also just help you to feel so much better because as humans, we are meant to spend the majority of our time in a place of regulation. When we get dysregulated, it happens a lot, so it’s not like dysregulation is bad, but we’re meant to go into dysregulation for very short bursts of time. Then we are always supposed to flexibly come back into regulation and into co-regulation with other people in order to rest and digest and heal throughout the day. We’re not meant to stay in fight or flight for long periods of time or many days. This is what most founders are doing so much so that they get stuck in these fight or flight or freeze states. And then they wonder why they’re spinning their wheels in their business or why they just can’t take things to the next level or why they just can’t get over this certain thing that they want to overcome. Like, how do I turn off my business brain at night? Or how do I get over imposter syndrome? Or why am I preoccupied with what this person said and derails me for days? This is what happens when we just get stuck. [00:20:36] So learning how to regulate yourself and especially learning how to get into the place. State is a, one of the most strategic things you can do. Okay. So I’ll get off my soap box about that. I hope you are nodding your head going. Yeah, I think the place, state’s a good idea. So let’s talk about how you actually get into the place state. Now the first thing that you need to do in order to bring more of a sense of play into your Workday. Is to actually know how it feels. [00:21:11] And I think this is a wonderful question that often comes up with founders that I work with. It’s one of the things they first say to me, which is I actually, you know, now that you’re describing this, I don’t actually know, but this feels like, and I remember having that same conversation with myself as well. So often as adults and as founders, we lose our sense of play. We don’t prioritize our sense of play. It doesn’t feel necessary. It feels a bit lazy or irresponsible or frivolous to prioritize play, when we have to take care of kids, we have to pay the bills, we have to move the business forward. We have to, you know, do all of these adult things. We lose our sense of play so much so that we don’t actually know what it feels like. If you don’t know what it feels like, we can’t create it. Right. So I want you to think about just for a second. When’s the last time you felt playful. What I don’t want you to do is like, tell me the last time you played a sport. We’re like played with your kids because you can be playing a softball game and feel really anxious. That was me. That was like, you know, my worst nightmare when I had to like, get up to bat in front of a bunch of people at school and try to hit a ball and you know, swing and miss and just feel so embarrassed in front of everyone. I had social anxiety and I didn’t even know I had social anxiety until maybe five years ago. And then I was like, oh my goodness. I think I have a social anxiety. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is not necessarily playing quote unquote sport or doing a play activity. What I’m talking about is when the last time you felt playful. You felt truly really silly. Truly like, you’re just having a good time and it just feels really light. And I want you to maybe try to connect to that. You can even pause this episode and try to like, remember the last time you felt playful. Now, the important thing here is, when you’re thinking about feeling playful, it’s always about how you feel in the moment. So when we’re talking about feeling playful in your business, what we’re not talking about is feeling playful when you reach an outcome, when you reach a goal. When we’re sort of giving ourselves the gold star of like having made it. What we’re talking about is in this moment, in this process, like while I’m in process, I feel playful and it has nothing to do with the goal at all. It’s just like, I’m being silly and I’m enjoying myself right now. I am enjoying this process. [00:24:09] Most people when they try to connect to the last time they felt playful in their business. It might’ve been at some point in the very beginning. Like when you were just daydreaming about the business, not for everyone, because some people get into a lot of analysis, paralysis and confusion and concern, and I don’t know what the right business model is and will this work and how will I sell? All of that dysregulated thinking when they’re actually designing the business. So this might not be you, but, some people at some point or another in the beginning, they have fun dreaming about the business. Maybe it’s like the business name or like what they think that it will be like to work for themselves. They imagine it working and they imagine like this idealized utopia version of the business. If you could just take a snapshot of that and bottle that feeling up, even if you just experienced it for like two minutes- that is play. That very expansive, fun, energizing to work on, to think through. I’m having creative ideas. I am compelled to take action, even if it’s just writing. Writing down my the ideas. I’m brainstorming. I want to get out my Sticky notes. This type of feeling, if we could just take a snapshot of this, this is play. It is really objective and it’s really when things can become clear and decisive really quick. Now, a lot of founders don’t stay in this very long before they dropped back down into confusion and analysis paralysis. But, despite that we want to just make sure that we understand what play is and what it feels like. So if you can connect with even just like a small little moment, that is the first place to start. Now once we know what play feels like, we want to try to create eat at more and more and to increase the amount of time we spend in the place state. One of the most helpful places you can start to practice your playfulness is in your sales and marketing because of what I said before, about how it helps you to tap into co-regulation, which will grow your business. [00:26:28] Let’s be honest, most founders struggle with pitching, selling, marketing. They need to do this in the beginning. They have to somewhat be the face of their business for a particular period of time. Even if they outsource the sales and marketing, they’re going to have to co-regulate with their team and learn how to compel people to move forward. If you’re a founder, you’re always in the business of sales either internally or externally. So the more you can create a playfulness around that, the better when it comes to growing your business and creating that progress, you really want. I would also say that most founders are in fight flight and freeze in their sales and marketing more than any other area inside of their business. We want to start to practice and expand this skillset into sales and marketing as much as we can. Now in order to feel playful with your sales and marketing. It all comes down to your ability. To create safety for yourself. So, this is like the opposite of what accelerator culture startup culture is teaching, which is like fake it till you make it right? Just get out of your comfort zone and then eventually you’ll get more comfortable with selling. While that is like fundamentally true from one angle, one perspective, because we do know that when we step into a dysregulating and environment and we come out alive, our nervous system will most likely register: okay, that wasn’t life-threatening now we’re not going to feel as dysregulated. Next time we go into that scenario because we’re building like normalcy on safety around it. [00:28:03] On the one hand, that is true. However, because of what we know about trauma and trauma informed action taking, it’s not always the case. Sometimes you can step into a very dysregulating environment, get dysregulated, go into fight or flight, come out of that scenario and never go back to a sense of safety. Never come back into regulation. Then you’re stuck there and then you bring that dysregulated a brain into the other areas of your business. This is what can eventually cause burnout. So we don’t just want to, at all costs follow that very old school way of thinking of just out of your comfort zone, and this is how it works for everybody. We want to make sure that you are dipping into dysregulating environments, meaning places that you are just not comfortable yet places that you’re like a little nervous, about little scared of. We want to dip in and out in a very trauma informed way so that you can come back into this founder peak performance zone immediately after. We want to work on practicing more safety when we’re actually in the scary scenario. So instead of just jumping in, I want you to imagine. I don’t know if I’ve told this story on that, on the podcast, but I think it might relate. So I used to work on a privately owned luxury mega yacht that traveled around the world and like 200, you know, really wealthy people owned it. And I was on board first as an intern, and then I had several roles on board before I moved to the corporate office in Miami and that was my life before I started my first company. So when I was an intern, we were in Antarctica and we were there over a two-week period of time over Christmas. It was a fantastic experience. Although it was my first Christmas away from my family, but I got to like be with penguins and, you know, be around icebergs. So that was pretty cool. One of the things that we got to do with the residents was to do something called the polar plunge. So we got to literally jump into the icy water with like icebergs and penguins around us and jump in and then get back out. It was like the ultimate cold plunge. Right? The ultimate nervous system reset. And so I jumped in and I was feeling, when I jumped in, actually pretty playful in that moment. Now my heart was racing, I had adrenaline, but because of the, co-regulation the support and the excitement and the playfulness of all my coworkers and all those residents creating so much fun around it that I actually was in the play state when I did it, even though I had signs of quote, unquote nervousness. And that might not have been the case for everyone else. There might’ve been people there that had dropped into anxiety. And dropped into fight or flight and still jumped in and then got back out and did not have the same effect that I did when I jumped in. Now I have also done cold plunge after sauna here in Norway with my husband at a spa hotel and felt super anxious doing it. So I think a lot of it has to do with the safety of the people around you and how we can co-regulate with one another. So that’s a fun, interesting side note. When we think about the place, date is how important a safe structure of other humans is around you in order for you to go on the journey of getting uncomfortable. But I tell that story because even though we’re going to do something that feels very big, very bold, very visible, we actually do have resources that we can tap into in order to manipulate and create the place state. Even though it’s new, even though it’s kind of scary, we can use tools to create it. And so we want to know how it feels, we want to know how regulation feels, we want to know how play feels, and we want to know how fight flight freeze feels so that we can really support ourselves based on what nervous system state we’re in. [00:32:21] We don’t want to just go through it unknowingly. And I think that this is a big problem with founders is that they actually don’t know what fight flight freeze and play on any of these feels like and so they’re just. operating with their thoughts in their mind and they don’t actually know how to use the communication of what’s happening in their body. [00:32:40] We want to create safety like I did that day when I, you know, went into plunge into the icy waters. We want to make sure that we are expanding our capacity in this way, because that’s when we’ll grow our business. [00:32:54] Now, creating this sense of play and this sense of safety for your sales and marketing, is actually not that different than creating it when I jumped into to do the polar plunge. I first had to know what to expect. I had to really look at, okay, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go down to this platform and you’ve been on that platform many times, we had like the coolest in the restaurant in the back, literally the whole back of the ship, like opened up, big like Drawbridge of a castle, like it just opened up and it became this platform where people could eat dinner. So I’d been on this platform many times helping to serve meals and I do dispatch of kayaks and things and so I had a visual of what I would be doing, where I would be going. I knew that people, I actually knew officers that I actually knew, that I trusted, including my boyfriend, who was an officer at the time, now my husband would be in a Zodiac, right out there to snatch me, if for some reason I couldn’t spend on my own. And I knew that I had like, you know, medical people around and surgeons. I mean, there were so many high level residents that I knew that I’d be fine. So, even though I knew I was going to go through this new and uncomfortable thing, I felt really safe because I knew what I was going to experience. I knew I had a safety net. I also knew that I was decided. I’m going to do this and these are the steps I’m going to do. So I had a lot of clarity and I had a lot of commitment and I had a lot of courage with that safety net. That’s what we need to create as a baseline before we can create play with our sales and marketing. We have to actually, first of all, have clarity. I’m going to take you through a few CS that I think are really important when it comes to entrepreneurial mindset and especially creating a foundation for you to tap into the place state. The first one is clarity. If you don’t know what you’re selling, you don’t know who you’re selling it to. You don’t know how to describe it. You don’t know what your sales and marketing strategy is exactly what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it. If you don’t know and feel confident in the fact that you really love your people, if you don’t feel clear around the value proposition and the value and the importance of your product. If you don’t feel really clear and sure and committed with like how you’re showing up and how you’re talking and what you’re saying. All of these things have to be there. That clarity has to be there in order for you to feel safe. And so a lot of entrepreneurs when they start struggling with increasing sales or even just creating that financial sustainability in the beginning. They’re really while they’re in a lot of fight or flight, cause they’re like I got to pay the bills now and they start to get really impatient and they start to just try a bunch of stuff in their sales and marketing from a place of fight or flight. And we know when you’re in fight or flight, that your strategies are going to be really bloated and you’re going to be doing a lot more. And we know that when you’re in fight or flight, you’re not co-regulating and coming across as a safe person, but this is like subconscious. And in order to solve it, the entrepreneur thinks, well, I just need more strategies. I just need to do more. I just need to find the right solution. That’s what their brain is telling them. But in order to actually solve that problem, we have to actually create a clarity first. And commitment based on that clarity of here’s, who I’m selling to. Here’s what I’m selling. Here’s why I love it. Here’s why I am enough. Here’s why I’m valuable. Here’s why I am great showing up in this way. Here’s why my marketing is really designed well. Here’s why my marketing is impactful and not sleazy. All of these things are really important for you to have clarity and to connect to in order for you to feel safe. Without that, we can’t make very competent sure decision. And to stick to those decisions for a long enough period of time to actually have good data around testing and tweaking it. Without that clarity, when you try something and it doesn’t work, your brain will start to try to throw it all out and redo it, trying to create that original clarity. So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that a brand new founder has picked a niche for their SAS business. They go out and they try to sell to this niche and that niche doesn’t buy. They go through five, 10 sales calls and that first niche that they want to explore for their service doesn’t buy. If they didn’t have the baseline of clarity beforehand, and they hadn’t done that mindset work and they hadn’t done all of that good decision-making from the beginning using the place state in the beginning and they are in fight or flight. Their brain is going to try to throw out all the moment and they just created and start from scratch that their brain will say, well, it’s, maybe it’s not the right niche. Maybe it’s not the right marketing strategy. So they will go out and they will reinvent the wheel because the brain, the way the brain is registering it and problem solving it. So it’s really important that you have a regulated brain when you are trying to create the clarity and you get to a place of decisiveness and commitment so that you can go through that season of courage in order to test and tweak in a very intentional, organized and patient way where you’re really looking at data and you’re not throwing everything out. You’re just making small tweaks. And in order to stick with the same niche, the same value proposition, the same marketing strategy, and just tweak the messaging slightly. For example, you have to be able to enjoy that process. Otherwise, you’re just so in a rush to get out of that season. That you’re going to just be like splattered paint on the wall, trying anything, trying to get out of the uncomfortable emotions, because you just need to get to success in order for your you to feel confident because you’re not having any fun. [00:39:38] Now, you’re like, I need to just figure this out so I can feel better. So in order to actually be an intentional calculated strategic entrepreneur who follows the lean startup methodology of test and tweak and using data. You have to be okay with the process. You have to enjoy the process. You cannot be in a rush. And that is why the play state is so helpful, but in order to create this playfulness through all of that testing and tweaking and failing and figuring it out. You have to have clarity around who you are and how you’re showing up. Sometimes that requires coaching, because oftentimes we can’t get out of this confusion and this analysis paralysis and this insecurity in our own brain and that’s okay. Human brains sometimes get stuck. We need other humans to help us to get to clarity. Once you have that clarity, you’ll be able to get more playful with the process that you’re going to go on. When you try to go sell it when you’re testing and tweaking. That’s just one example. This example could be for literally any entrepreneur at any stage who wants to try out a new growth strategy who wants to scale up? We would have to go through the same process of getting clear of making decisions and really tapping into playfulness during the process of testing or tweaking until it’s working well, then we would just move the carrot, we would set a new goal and we’d go do the process again. [00:41:09] So I like to say how you start a business is how you scale it. The process literally never changes, right? Now. I want to, as we wrap up, cause I know I’m just, I’m just loving this conversation so I could just talk for hours and hours and hours about it. But what I want to do to wrap up is give you some reflection questions that you can ask yourself in order to start to foster more playfulness in your business and especially more playfulness in your sales and marketing. But before I do that, I want to just give you another important caveat because I’ve heard it quite a bit. So bear with me because I think this is really important, especially for the purpose-driven entrepreneurial space. [00:41:49] Many founders including you, might be listening to this episode saying like, nope, I’m not in fight or flight, that’s like the old school, hustle, you know, go bigger, go home masculine approach and I’m not about that. I’m about the modern day conscious more feminine approach, and I’m not going to burn out and I’m going to take care of myself and I’m going to end. I have a lot of self care and I really prioritize being in the flow. If that’s you, I think that’s wonderful. I’m not talking down to you. I just want to give you a little something to chew on and think about. I’ve heard this said to me many times, and a lot of the times when this type of entrepreneur gets into coaching, what we find is a lot of indecision and procrastination. It masquerades itself as the flow. So here’s what happens. The entrepreneur is a very successful driven person in their professional career. They’ve climbed the corporate ladder. They have been in fight or flight in that past business, even though they might not have known it and they burned out. They start their business with this intention of, you know, I’m done with that fight or flight world. I’m not going to burn out anymore. This new business is going to prioritize me and my needs and my self care. Now they probably, at this point, don’t have any knowledge of nervous system regulation. They just know that they were burned out there and they know that self-care helps. Of course self care is going to help you to stay in the peak performance zone, but we don’t want to only be able to access it when we’re at the spa, because we can’t just go to the spot all the time. You have to run our business. We need to know how to create this playfulness and this place state, as well as flow, whenever we want it, no matter what’s happening in a moment. That’s what proper tools can help you to do. The reason why I’m telling you this little story or this, you know, this little side comment is because most founders, 90% of founders, are struggling with fight flight and freeze. They are not actually in the peak performance zone, especially not in play very often. Just because you have experienced a burnout and are currently reducing the amount of output, reducing the amount of hours you work now and prioritizing self care and, you know, maybe have some language around the flow and prioritizing feeling in the flow, I want to caution you to just give yourself the gold star, like the pass, like you’ve got this. Because there’s always an invitation to be able to have more, more control over and a stronger skillset around creating play. At any moment that you want to. In three minutes, you can create the play state, like boom, like that. A lot of founders, especially these that have gone through a burnout and are scared of that are actually using outside circumstances like spas and self care to help to get them into this flow state, but it’s very hard to do when it kind of comes and goes and they don’t feel like they have control over it. It’s like they’re trying to stay in the flow and then when they’re not in the flow, then they’re not doing anything. That can lead to a lot of inaction and procrastination. So if this is you, it’s okay, it’s such good news because it means that you don’t have to wait until the flow comes back to you. The universe doesn’t have to align and you don’t have to spend so much time on self care with the right tools you can create play just like that. [00:45:41] In my 21 day nervous system reset, I will teach you some somatic movements that you can use that will help you to create the play state and just about, you know, three minutes, once you practice this, you can create play like in 15 seconds. Once you get used to it and also my program will help you to build up your belief in your, and your clarity around what you sell, how you sell it, how you show up so that you have that baseline of safety going into sales and marketing so that you can go bigger and bolder. All right. [00:46:14] The tools that I’m teaching inside of my programs are going to help you to make this super practical, to give you so much more control. I really don’t like in the business space, it’s one of the reasons why I say, you know, in the intro of the show this is not like about woo-woo manifestation, is because I want to have a 1, 2, 3 step process that I can do, and I know it’ll work and it doesn’t take a long time and I want to be able to rinse and repeat it. That’s how we grow sustainable businesses. That’s why I love body-based techniques. Not only are they inclusive of everyone’s belief systems, like I was talking about at the beginning, but they are really easy for just anyone to use, no matter what stage they are at or what type of entrepreneur they are at. Like I said, at the beginning, they’re going to help you to create better leaner, tighter strategies and action plans and then actually to be able to execute them faster, but with the feeling of more ease because of how regulated you are, because we just feel good when we’re regulated. [00:47:18] That’s my last tangent. I want to give you some reflection questions for you to ask so that you can start to feel more playfulness in your sales and marketing. So the first reflection question that you can think about as you go throughout your week would be, what am I not clear on in my business? If there’s a lot of un-clarity lying around, that’s going to create a sense of threat for your survival brain and we need to clear it up. We don’t need a hundred percent clarity, but we need at least that baseline. You can also ask yourself, what am I not undecided on. Unmade decisions are really bad from a strategic standpoint and from a nervous system standpoint. You can also ask yourself, what have I not fully committed to yet. Are you resisting testing and tweaking. Are you resisting learning ads? Are you resisting a new strategy? Are you resisting a new team member? I don’t know. Whatever it is, there resistance to a process that you need to go through? Or are you embracing the process? Knowing that it will take time? And are you ready to figure out a way to enjoy that process? Can we just settle in? This is one of the most brilliant things that I’ve done in my parenting, is that there are some things that are really tough. Like for example, when you bring home a newborn and they’re not sleeping and FYI, I have a three and a five-year-old and they’re like still waking up in the middle of the night sometimes. So, this is a long season, you have to commit to and find fun in right. One of the biggest things in my parenting that has helped me is to stop resisting the process. I either need to do something about it to change it, or I need to settle in. There’s no reason to not do anything differently, but to resist the process, resist the season that you’re in. [00:49:07] So you actually can be quote unquote, struggling in the business, quote, unquote, struggling to learn how to sell a new product and be in a lot of playfulness and fun. You can feel like you’re on a treasure hunt. Like I love my product. I love my people. I know the value. I know that I am enough to serve my audience and I am an, I know I can figure out any sales and marketing I want to. Now I’m on the treasure hunt. What is going to be the thing that’s going to work? What’s going to be the message that they need to hear in order to get them compelled I’m on the treasure hunt. I’m going to test and tweak it a million times out. I’m willing to do it for a year. Let’s go. It can feel so fun when you’re in that place. So you really want to ask yourself, what am I resisting? What am I not committed to? Where do I not have this courage and fun? With the current season that I’m in, in my business, we want a lot of energy and motivation and emotional connection to the season that we’re in. So those are the first questions I think that are the baseline questions and then throughout your day, you can ask yourself: what about this is fun? You know, confirmation bias is so powerful in our brain once we’ve got the baseline of clarity figured out and the baseline of decisiveness figured out. We often just need to stop exercising the neural pathways of this is not fun and we start, need to start exercising the neural pathway off this is fun. To create that confirmation bias, so the brain notices more that’s fun. If you just keep noticing how things are not working not things are not fun or why you’re not good enough or why you’re not competent enough, the brain is going to register that threat and then go to hypervigilance. Don’t notice more of that same threat through confirmation bias. So we want to say to ourselves throughout the day, you know, parts of this are fun. What about this is fun. How can I create more of that fun, right here right now? Without needing to go into buffering self care. Like I talked about before, we don’t need to have no fun in the business and then go vege out at the spa to make up for it. We want to create it regardless of the circumstance in this moment. You can create it even if you are struggling to learn something new, you’re hitting failure and you’re frustrated. You can create fun, even if you’re jumping into an ICO ocean, right? Just like I did. It is always accessible to you with the right perspective. With the right attention. The right question. That’s why coaching can be so powerful because we can actually shift what we’re paying attention to. Everything changes underneath that. So those are some reflection questions I would love for you to ponder this week and then of course, as I mentioned, you have the rest of this week until January 31st to snack up the 21 day reset, which is going to help you to make this really simple with visuals and tools and somatic exercises in order for you to create the play state, whenever you want it, so you can go bigger and bolder and create that progress you really want.