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- the algorithm showed your marketing to a person
- that person had a need
- that need happened at the right time
- that person had budget
- that budget was provided by someone who was most likely not them
- the budget was available at the right time
- some character of your marketing triggered something in that person that caused them to wonder if you were the right person
- they probably had some conversations with their own team ahead of reaching out to you – or at least checked availability, timeframe, project requirements, budgets…
- and then they contacted you when it all lined up.
- I asked around: I asked my neighbours about their gym memberships, I asked my friends about pricing and what to expect.
- I did some pricing research.
- I contact all my local gyms
- I went to visit the gyms
- I said YES to the Lifeline Pushup Challenge, and recruited some mates; the timing seemed Divine, get my drift? It asked, do you really want to do this? Yes. Yes I did. I could do it at home.
- I got happy in my movement.
- When when you take the risk, you are open to new idea flow. Those ideas, when actioned, often solve the risk.
- Sometimes you have to break your own pricing rules to create what actually matters.
The devil’s second-greatest triumph is the illusion of Control
July 20th, 2024If the devil’s greatest triumph might have been convincing us that he doesn’t exist, then his second-greatest triumph was convincing us that we control our lives and the world.
Control is illusory
In a call with a coaching client this morning, we went deep on the issue of control. She asked me something along the lines of, ‘How do I let go and just stay open?’.
The truth is that all control is illusory except for when it comes to our own responses to the world, either in thought, in word, or in deed.
People in general are convinced that they are able to control outcomes. Control is a known cognitive fallacy, characterised as a cognitive distortion. From Exploring Your Mind:
As an entrepreneur, you are very likely to be one of these people, and not just because you’re a perfectionist, controlling, or rigid. It’s also because you know that everything in your business depends on you. Now, in the article that the above quote comes from that’s characterised as a belief. But for freelancers, it isn’t a belief, it’s a fact: If you don’t act in particular ways, you don’t get paid. If you don’t get paid, you don’t eat/travel/sleep in a bed, etcetera.
So why is control illusory, if so much depends on you? It’s because nothing that comes to you is truly because of you: It’s because of what I choose to name ‘God’, and what many modern folk choose to name ‘the universe’.
As an example, say you’ve been doing some fantastic marketing. You get someone who comes out of the blue and says, ‘hey we saw your Insta, we’d love you do take on this project’. It looks like your marketing created that outcome.
But it didn’t. It might have influenced the outcome, but it didn’t control it:
Did you make all those things line up? Of course not.
Could you make all those things line up? No way, not in a million years!
So did you control the outcome? Noooope.
What you did was to take a step. You knew that to grow your business, it helps if your business is visible. You (for a range of reasons) chose Instagram as the platform for a digital marketing action.
That’s all you did.
Everything else? Not you.
You can only take the next logical step
Once you realise that you can only take the next logical or baby step, and that controlling the outcome is not possible, it is immensely freeing. It gives you the capacity to do the things you must do and release all attached feelings to those things.
Those feelings might be guilt, resentment, anxiety, or fear. Once they’re gone, all that’s left is joy and peace, and that’s a beautiful place to be.
Women in particular benefit from letting go of the idea of ‘control’
Those of you who are entrepreneurs and freelancers live as women in a very masculine way. You are competitive perfectionists, most of the time. You support yourself financially, and probably always have – therefore nobody ‘looks after’ you. Many of your colleagues are male; I know that of my own network, the majority of my friends have been male for this exact reason.
It also doesn’t help that female entrepreneurs have, for the longest time, been characterised as Mumpreneurs. Which, frankly, is unhelpful for those who are not mums. For mums, it gives them a community that is actually meaningful, but until you become a mum you cannot understand this nor even feel its importance.
There is also another barrier: Feminism. Some of us don’t want to be painted with the F brush. We’re just women who do business. That’s all. The F word has a disgusting history, in my opinion has damaged society, and isn’t something of any value.
But there’s a problem with living in a masculine way. It interrupts your ability to be feminine, in the sense of being open, allowing, receiving, gentle, and forgiving. It pushes you into a box that tells you that you control things. You don’t.
Women discover this when they face pregnancy and birthing. I recall that when I was pregnant, someone told me that Type A perfectionists have an extraordinarily higher chance of having breech babies. After my own baby being breech, I can tell you why: We want to do things our way. We want to control things. Having your body do its own thing because of someone else is one of the most challenging things to face.
You have to let go and allow
When it comes to pregnancy and birthing, you can’t control when you get pregnant: That’s all God. You can’t control the birth: That’s all God and your new little person, not you! You actually have to get out of your brain and out of the way, and if you don’t then your labour isn’t going to be as lovely as it could be.
Women have to allow themselves to be women. Celebrate your menses, instead of moaning about it. Celebrate that your boobs grow and shrink, instead of moaning about it. Celebrate that you feel the world, where men think about the world.
Read my book Liminal Woman to learn about my journey of learning this.
Taking the step is not control, it’s just taking the step
Whatever is your next step, take the step. In this manifest realm, you’ll notice that when you do things in a physical way – you speak it aloud, you write it down, you take an action – something happens.
This is why Mike Dooley tells you to take baby steps in the directions of the wish you want to be manifested.
This is why Tom T. Moore teaches us that because we’re in a physical realm, the spiritual actions we take must also be physical actions.
It’s why in the Bible, you’ll learn that you must ‘cry out’ to the Lord.
It’s all the same thing. Take the step, write the thing, that’s as far as your control goes.
All the rest is up to the universe or God.
xx Leticia
PS. Spoiler alert: This is also why business happens in the real world in front of people. But that’s a story for another time….
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[REVIEW] Stacks On @ Domain Theatre (Adelaide) 17 July 2024
July 17th, 2024Stacks On is a circus performance for kids that you’ll want to think twice about going to. Here’s why.
When I saw Stacks On promoted at Cirkidz, I was excited at the opportunity to take my little guy Beren (Mister 3-years-old) to a theatre show by circus performers. He had recently completed his own first performance, was thrilled by the experience of being on a stage, and spent weeks talking about how he was going to join in ‘no matter what’. So after swimming in the morning, we headed over to the Domain Theatre at Marion’s Cultural Centre for the 11.30 am showing, on Stacks On‘s opening day.
We piled into the theatre, got some great seats, and spent a little while feeling the pre-show excitement. Literally everything was new for Beren: Smoke from a smoke machine, stage lighting, fold-up seats, ticket ladies. Everything. He insisted on sitting on his own seat and asking what everything was for, and asking what is going to happen next.
Before Stacks On began, we were all informed that they were happy to be performing on Kaurna Land (uh, really? This is a thing now?), and gave us the cliff-notes: No phones on, you can take pictures afterwards, there will be photo opportunities at the end, etc.
And then the show began.
Stacks On was billed as a fun circus performance for families. Its flyers had a performer holding up stacks of cardboard or balsa-wood people. This all lead to the impression that the performance was an acrobatic show.
Acrobatics is Beren’s favourite thing about circus.
The show began promisingly. The cardboard-or-wood people were known as ‘Babblers’, we discovered. In the early stages of the show, they magically moved the performers around as they were moved about. We had some fun acrobatics and contemporary dance moves. We had some great expressions, falls, rolls, jumps, and excitement.
But then, somehow, Stacks On became a much-too-detailed story about someone who is born, grows up, goes to war (yes really), dies, is mourned over with lots of weeping, and then… Somehow a puppet emerges who dances around and has apparently no relevance to the story. I wracked my brains to work it out, and even this mature-aged, storyteller brain couldn’t understand the storyline. Or maybe I just tuned out because I was bored and the story didn’t make sense.
The birth of the new person I was like, yeah ok.
The growing up of the new person involved some fun acrobatics, relatable to children.
But Stacks On was critical of business, of competition, of work. Depictions of work were negative and filled with flurry. All the people at the top of the ‘ladder’ were nasty, horrible people. Then, the nasty horrible people who owned the corporation became big frightening figures who made all the little people go to war.
The war sequence was fun for Beren because of the bangs and booms… and the type of violence that he adores, and which challenges me on a very personal and play basis every single day. I wasn’t jazzed about it.
But when the person died, and there was crying and mourning, and when there were sad visitations to parents, and…. whatever happened next (who knows, I’d tuned out), it was just way too grown up.
More importantly, by the middle of Act II, Stacks On had completely lost its audience.
The kids didn’t understand the story. The parents didn’t understand the story. Nobody cared. The kids were looking around for the next trick, because the last one was a long time ago. The parents were talking to each other. Beren kept asking me what was going on, what did this mean, and where is the circus.
And I was sitting there wondering how on Earth I had paid $40 to go to a political show that was filled with adult themes (about which we weren’t warned), that apparently had a premise against my personal and family values (we value work, we love business, we see capitalism as providing housing and services, and a positive way to live life), and that was just way out of line with the age group and the promotion of the show. The writing left a lot to be desired, and frankly the show never redeemed itself. In the end a puppet emerged out of something, danced around shaking its butt (more age-inappropriate content) and pointing at…. something… and then they all hugged and that was the end.
Like. What? If you can’t write a story, don’t have a story. Just tell some tales, ask the audience if you can stack yourself up as high as you can and get their interaction, and fall down. Bam, you’d have kids engaged for a whole hour and laughing the entire time.
But this. This was dark and weird.
Why weren’t the adult themes flagged on the flyers?
Why was Stacks On billed as ‘fun family circus’, when very little of it involved circus performance and most of it was simply a play? And not a very good one, at that?
Why wasn’t the storyline mentioned anywhere so we could have made a real decision about whether or not to go?
Why was it such a bad story when there are so many resources out there that kids love. Start with the Grimm Brothers if you have nothing!
Much of the performance involved handling and playing tiny little Babblers, which failed to come across from the stage. Sitting rows back in the audience, the detail was lost. It might work fine with a camera and a screen, but not in person.
Many of the circus tricks – the penny rolls, the flips, the jumps – were thrown in as transitions, and that only by one of the performers who apparently just liked to flip at random. The other two performers didn’t do anything like it, except in the dance sequence.
After writing this, I realise how damning this review looks. It wasn’t all bad.
The tricks and stacking on that took place were well executed and good fun. The relationship between the physical action of one and the physical action of another was good fun. There was real promise in this show. It’s just that the promises weren’t delivered.
The execution of the show was (mostly) pretty good, apart from the performers forgetting about how fiddling with tiny objects does not translate to a theatre audience. And they’re obviously talented circus folk.
Stacks On was mainly used as a way to promote Cirkidz and its work, which is a move that I applaud because Cirkidz is a fantastic circus school (we’re going back for another semester, after all). However, it is misleading at best. They would have been better off ditching the long, involved, adult storyline. Politics has no place in family or children’s entertainment. Kids are here to be entertained, and to imitate. Cirkidz would have been better off writing something built on Grimm’s Fables, and focusing on making the action the highlight.
Let’s face it. We were there for circus tricks. I wouldn’t mind betting that most of the other folk were there for the same reason.
At the end we all went out onto the stage and had a play with the little Babblers, and that was kinda fun for about five minutes. At least, until the kids got grabby-grabby and impatient. The ‘photo opportunities’ promised at the beginning never materialised. Or, maybe the Babbler play was the photo opportunity?
And my little guy enjoyed rolling all around the performance floor, and then bowing to the empty theatre. He asked me if he could perform there one day. Of course you can, little mate!
So even though I have enormous misgivings about the show – and will rethink anything else promoted by the team as a result – the three year old loved the war scene and the opportunity to experience a theatre.
Now I’m off to buy party poppers to recreate the war scene in his play, when actually I’d hoped he’d be more jazzed about practising his own acrobatic stunts instead.
Sigh; can’t win ’em all, I guess.
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Dear Artist: All is not black or white
July 1st, 2024Dear Artist
Not everything you must create must be done start-to-finish, end-to-end, or even wholly by you. Sometimes it’s enough to do just one part.
If you don’t have the budget or makings to complete a pair of leggings with an overskirt, shoot for the skirt and buy the leggings.
If you don’t have the envelopes to send a letter, make one with a page from a magazine and some sticky tape.
Creation isn’t an Entire Book, a Musical Score, or A Feature Film. Creation is the moment in which something wants you to make it.
Often, that something is smaller than you think.
xx Leticia
PS. Did you read this one? | Dear Artist: Criticism can kill you
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Welfare is a great idea but it programs scarcity
June 27th, 2024Welfare is heralded as a life-saver but, as it is handled in Australia, it programs people with a scarcity mindset. It therefore works against its stated objectives.
Here’s the problem with welfare payments, as I see it in my own lived experience and by direct observation of others:
Welfare stops people wanting to work.
It stops them wanting to work because they become afraid that financial abundance will become a penalty.
Welfare in Australia is a financial-abundance penalty system
Many of Australia’s ‘Centrelink payments’ (Centrelink is the name of the paying agency) are just high enough to become significant in some way, such that when they cease (or reduce) it becomes a cost-of-living problem.
Therefore, the reduction becomes a more substantial problem. Instead everything becoming a ‘should I or should I not work’ question, it becomes ‘how can I avoid hurting this safety net’.
People shy away from getting money of any kind once they’re in the system, because their income is ‘penalised’ by a reduction. It actively stops people from grasping new opportunities, trying new things, or even moving beyond whatever is their smallest baseline.
For example:
“I can’t do/earn X, Y or Z because it will affect my Centrelink payments.”
Here are some examples from my own life:
My dad, who is a deeply experienced consultant, semi-retired, won’t charge a proper fee because it might affect his pension. (Despite a proper fee being better than the pension in multiple dimensions–from individual freedom to financial nest-egg–and creating reasonable client expectations for others in the same field.) He also shies away from finding ways to leverage his extensive experience for the benefit of others, because any fee he earns will negatively affect his fixed revenue in the form of the pension.
In another case, a woman I know personally won’t do some extra work in her communities, despite it benefiting both her and them in positive ways, because “it might affect my Centrelink payments”.
Another woman I know only does occasional, seasonal work because it might affect her payments the rest of the year. This despite the fact that she’s a single mum, the work would be good for her state of mind, and her son would have someone to look up to in a (differently) meaningful way. Instead, she spends an inordinate amount of time lying in bed, scrolling, which destroys both mind and body.
Another person I know is afraid to run any kind of business because it might affect her payments.
And in my own case, even though the parenting payment I receive for mumming full-time is Sweet Fanny Adams, when my partner earns more in a week and it runs to zero I experience a sense of survival panic.
The issue, as far as I see it, is two-fold.
Firstly, it is utterly nonsensical that anyone in a capitalist economy would penalise the creation of wealth or the participation in social good. Why not give someone a bonus and some positive messaging when their earnings increase instead? Note: Not all bonuses are financial. Maybe the bonus is a voucher for somewhere. Maybe the message says, ‘Congratulations on your increased income! We will reduce your payment dollar-for-dollar’, rather than simply yanking the whole thing at a moment’s notice.
Secondly, the payments are often not tied to anything concrete. For my purposes here, money is not considered to be a ‘concrete’ object. Was it Zig Ziglar or someone like him who once suggested that folks receiving welfare because they’re out of work ought to be visited and encouraged to do something for their own dwellings in order to get their money? Small actions beget bigger actions, and any action is better than none.
Additionally, because the payments are meaningless, people assign meaning to them.
There are other problems. The annual reporting cycle doesn’t match the financial year. People are asked to estimate income for two years in advance of where they are (which is impossible and ridiculous; has nobody in this system had financial training?). The agency considers ‘cash’ to be ‘hard cash’, not the usual ‘cash equals money in the bank’–so what other definitions are made up by bureaucrats outside of whatever is commonly accepted? Payments appear to be increased and reduced on a hidden scale. They are given and taken away according to an obscure system nobody understands. They are not tied to anything that is communicated as being important, beyond whether or not you’re earning money somewhere else–and then the timing is often more than a fortnight after you’ve had the increase, and you’re back to working on whatever was baseline.
Can you imagine if instead stay-at-home mothers received letters saying, ‘you’re raising our next generation; thank you – here’s your fixed wage’. Or those with mental health issues received letters stating, ‘We love that you’re maintaining your home so well while you’re unable to work due to anxiety. Thanks for keep up with daily life in this small way.’ Or imagine if retirees saw this: ‘Thanks for working for 60 years of your life, here’s a reward that won’t change; feel free to continue contributing in all your amazing ways’.
Now wouldn’t that be amazing?
Instead, the payments exist inside a penalty system that creates and entrenches scarcity thinking. It makes me wonder, given everything is management, what type of psychopaths created it.
Is it any wonder that people who get payments find it so hard to improve their lives?
xx Leticia
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Movement equals money
June 23rd, 2024Recently, I joined a gym. And then I panicked about the fee.
The fee is pretty small. The joining offer covered all the admin, joining and membership fees. All I have to cough up is $39 a fortnight.
For a whole year.
My brain instantly went, holy hell how do I do that for a whole year if (insert worst-case scenarios 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7) take place??
So I figured I had to work out the exit fee. I had enough money in the bank to set that aside, if in the worst-case I had to exit and pay the fee.
Phew, right?
Nope. But at least it gave me some peace for a moment. And in that peace, I had an idea: I’d offer to cover the joining fee to my network in exchange for some minimal writing work.
And bam! I now don’t have to cover the fee myself, because someone else (who believes in me) is going to do it. He gets emails for a whole year; I get my gym membership covered; we both win.
Money fears are something I deal with regularly, as a coach. So often, artists and entrepreneurs hold fast to whatever level of success they’ve achieved, and become unwilling to spend money. It’s risk avoidance, often derived from a survival fear. Sometimes it becomes personal sabotage.)
Movement equals money
My experience is 100% that movement equals money. Another way to phrase this is: Invest in yourself and your dividends are real dollarbucks.
It isn’t that you have to be a Bro and get up at 5 am and go running on the beach, and then take an ice bath, and then meditate for an hour and journal your outcomes, and then take six more steps before you can go to work. It’s simply that when you invest in your own wellbeing, whatever that looks like, the money flows.
The money flows because you’re happy.
What the New Agers call ‘abundance’ means wealth, and wealth is in every dimension of your life. It’s your home, your happiness, your food, your health, your family, your body, your business, your friendships and relationships, your finances. When you take the steps to get your head right, your body and circumstances follow.
Let’s be clear that this rarely means therapy! Therapy should be short-lived and give you tools. If you’re living with therapy in your life without an end in sight, you’re not applying the tools.
Therefore, next time you can’t see how you can make something work, but you know that the something is going to make you happy, you have to take babysteps towards it anyway. Being frozen is going to stop the flow; getting anxious is going to cut it off completely.
And if you’re struggling with negative emotions, probably you’re not moving enough. Get into your body. Get your body straight. Focus on improvement. Then take the next baby step.
Baby steps get you to happiness where you are.
If you’re wondering how I went from nothing to a gym by taking babysteps, here’s what I did:
To paraphrase Mike Dooley, I could do pushups, or something better. But if I didn’t get ‘better’, I’d be happy with what I had.
Once I’d done this, a $200 deal hit my doorstep. It covered all of the initial fees, which were high! It was offered only to the first 50, so I jumped on it.
Today, I have not only committed myself to my own improvement, but I have covered the fee.
My point today is two-fold:
xx Leticia
PS. If you’re curious about my coaching service, read about it here.
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