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Shownotes:

Hey TBD Fam!

Oh, this episode is a vulnerable one, but if there’s anything I’m here for – it’s to share my stories & experiences so other people know they aren’t alone!

In this episode, I’m sharing the darker side of growth – especially when you get dysregulated by it and how to find your way back to center. We’ll talk about what dysregulation means, why it happens, how to spot it, and how to find your way out of it again!

If you know someone who needs to hear this episode, please share it!

Links mentioned:

• New 6-Month Beta Program

Exciting News!! I’m testing an all new accelerated track of my work for just 8 people to help you get your Minimum Lovable Offer out into the world! If you’re interested in a super intimate space + 1:1 Voxer support, DEFINITELY get in touch!! We’re starting May 9th and there are just a few spots left!

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Transcript:

Hello, hello my friends and welcome back to the show!  It’s been a big week over here at Megan Hale Co!  

I just announced a new Beta offer for just 8 people who want to work closely with me for the next 6 months to create and launch a 1:Many offer so if you’ve been ideating on a group offer (maybe it’s a certification, a membership, or group program) and you want to have a small, intimate space with 1:1 Voxer support, definitely check out my Beta announcement post on Instagram with all the details.  Link is in the shownotes! 

Spots are starting to fill and we’re getting started on May 9th!  

And just as an aside for those of you who’ve been keeping Flow on your vision board, my 12-month holistic mastermind where we’re focused on building out your signature offer that holds your body of work – it is in no way disappearing.  This beta is simply testing a different structure and pace for people who may want a shorter commitment and want to create the Minimum Lovable Offer to get it out into the world first!  

You know, I’ve been showing up on Instagram a lot lately!  In fact, probably more than I ever have because I’ve always been a FB girl. And I’m not promising I’m going to be over there consistently because me and consistent social media very rarely mix, but right now, I’ve been having a lot of fun!! 

And it’s actually one of my most recent posts that sparked the idea for this episode where I shared a Soul Truth that goes, “Anytime I’ve ever come out of a challenging season in business, my emergence can always be traced to a single moment I started trusting myself again.”

And what I want to break down in this episode is how we get knocked out of our self-trust because it’s way easier than you might think!  

You know it’ll be coming up on 2 years since I had my first multiple 6-figure launch.  It was July 2021 when I first launched Flow into the world and it’s taken me almost 18 months to truly regulate my nervous system to this new normal.  18 months!  

And I don’t think we talk nearly enough about this other side of the success coin.  

To paint a picture for you, I was earning multiple 6-figures in my business selling multiple offers before Flow came onto the scene and then replaced my revenue + then some with just one offer in just one launch, which was a huge shift to my business.  

And it wasn’t the money that dysregulated me.  It was the pressure I started putting on myself for this new offer to be the best it could ever be in Cohort 1.  And I want to talk about this, in particular, because I think so much of what we see online when it comes to success is the highlight reel and how amazing it is, but we don’t often see the other side of that coin.  And I think that’s for a few reasons: 

1. When success dysregulates you, it can take some time to figure out what’s going on, what’s getting triggered, and what dynamics are at play.  It’s hard to talk about something when you’re still sussing it out for yourself and the sussing can definitely take some time! 
   
2. The online space has this toxic culture of glamorizing success and letting everyone know how great it is because this is what makes people want it.  If people told others how uncomfortable it really was – it would create a perceived threat that maybe their dream wouldn’t sell if it didn’t deliver “perfect’.  

There’s an underlying message out there that says if you can just become successful enough, you’ll wash away all the hard things in life when my friends… the truth is you can never “success” your way out of your humanity.  

I’m going to say that again… you can never “success” your way out of your humanity. 

No matter how much money you make or clients you serve or impact you achieve, you will still be there in all your humanness experiencing self-doubt, experiencing seasons of misalignment, experiencing loss and grief, and all the other human things.  

This is why we have a core value in my company that says, Human First, LEO Second.  We use LEO in lieu of CEO because the L stands for leadership which I think much more accurately describes this role of growing and scaling a business.  And not only that, it lays such an intentional foundation for the culture I want to cultivate because even though I might have final say, I also want a collaborative environment and acknowledge I don’t know all the things.  

We say human first because no matter what is going on in your business, if there’s a shift to your capacity or you’re processing something big or whatever that looks like for you, tending to your humanity first and letting your LEO role be second is how we lead and love ourselves more generously.  

And whew… I’ve had to tend to my humanity a lot these past 18 months!! And it was that recent instagram post around trusting myself again that really sparked all the ways I’d gotten knocked out of my self-trust after bringing Flow into the world.  

That launch, as amazing as it was, dysregulated the fuck out of me and I want to speak to what dysregulation means for just a second so we’re all on the same page. 

Dysregulation, to me, means our nervous system doesn’t feel safe experiencing our current world (or rather our perceived world).  Because as I look back on Flow, the grand majority of the pressure I was experiencing was self-induced, but my perception was that there were all these people who were counting on me to deliver the absolute best experience.  But that’s not really the whole truth.  Because the best experience and the perfect experience are two wildly different things!  And when I got dysregulated (which was a huge fear of mine by the way – have you ever been scared that you might not be able to handle big success?  I know I have and now I’ve had the lived experience of kind of crumbling beneath it, but not in the way I thought I would).  

My dysregulation told me I needed to be perfect and that set off a whole string of old dynamics as I sought safety to regulate my nervous system.  And the thing about seeking safety is that we tend to go back to old patterns that weren’t necessarily healthy, but are familiar because its where you learned how to function.  

And for me, I have all kinds of unhealthy patterns where I hustled to belong, hustled to people please, hustled to control people’s perceptions of me and all kinds of fun things as us humans do.  And before I knew it, I found myself in the same old not-enoughness trap that I’d worked so hard to get free from over 8 years ago!!  

You do know I have a whole podcast detailing out that journey.   

The thing I’ve realized lately though is the minute I got dysregulated, I stopped trusting myself.  And it didn’t happen in one fell swoop.  It happened when people canceled their enrollment because the program wasn’t what they needed.  It happened when I was going deeper into my existing curriculum to teach concepts at a deeper level & hoping they delivered.  It happened when I realized the design of the program was too overwhelming for people and I needed to make some changes.  It happened as I was learning at hyper speed all the things I needed to step into to lead a program at this level.  

And the worst part is the more I sought to seek regulation, I continued to seek it outside of myself just like I’d done for years and years and years before I grounded myself in my enoughness.  

And even sadder is I could see what I was doing.  I knew I was not trusting myself.  I was second-guessing, experiencing so much indecision about what the next right step was and being so afraid I was going to get it wrong, I forgot I was capable of big things!  I experienced a freeze response navigating old traumas that were getting activated.  I started dimming my light and believing in myself and there is nothing as exhausting as letting any of those thoughts be your truth!  

So the past 18 months had been a journey of watching my self-trust erode and then finding my way back to it again.  And the way I’ve done it has been with heaping doses of self-forgiveness for not knowing things I could have possibly known without living through the experiences to gain the wisdom yet.  Heaping doses of self-compassion that my mind went down some old spirals and not being able to stop it even though I “knew” better.  And also finding my way back to what I call your BDE – your Big Deal Energy that reminds you of your greatness, your brilliance, your magic!!  

You know, I’ve been working with an amazing one-on-one client lately, Kirin Bhatti, who’s the founder of Brownswell. And we’ve been collaborating to really give language to her body of work that’s very based in relational leadership, where she works with leaders and organizations to learn the skills of attunement and cultivating connection.

And we were just mapping out her new introductory offer the other day that’s all about how we more deeply attune to ourselves and one another. How we build capacity for experiencing challenging emotions and also how we bring clean energy to the room, right?

And to our relationships and to our dynamics and to our connections. And as we were talking, I was asking her what the result of this work is for her clients, and she said that they feel more integrated in their bodies and have more access to their life force to create the soul led impact they’re here to make. Which just gave me goosebumps, by the way, just thinking about the impact that she is here to have in the world.

But it also really started to connect a lot of dots for me with how I’ve been out of right-relationship with myself these past 18 months, and the impact that that has had on my own life force, my sense of integration, right? It has been really challenging and has taken a long time to integrate a lot of these lessons,  especially working my way through all of the layers and connecting the dots for myself of like, how did I get disconnected from my life force to begin with? Couple that with the freeze response that I’ve also experienced, and like those two things have really, really felt like they have driven a wedge between me and my power, which is always a very disempowering feeling. Right. 

And so as we are mapping out her curriculum, one of the key processes that she guides her people through is to learn how to “be with versus fix”.

To not be the savior that needs to help others not experience pain, to not be the person that has it all figured out or has all the answers. That can really alleviate this sense of uncertainty that we are all going to experience in our journeys, right? But to really sit with other people. In it, which also reminded me of a passage in Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle, where she talks about our goal is not to rescue our people from pain, but instead walk straight into the fire with them knowing that we can handle it together.

And as I look back two years ago on my own dysregulation, ugh, I can notice the way I wanted to prevent my clients from experiencing pain and the hard shit. We all navigate in business as we clarify our body of work. But it’s not coming together as quickly as we want it to, or we’re clarifying our dream clients and really being asked to niche down and all the, the mindset stuff that comes up with that, right?

Because I, you can help those other people too. Or what makes them the perfect fit for you when it comes to their readiness? When you’re really having to clarify their prerequisites to step into your body of work? 

And then when we navigate the losses and disappointments, when a program doesn’t sell or doesn’t convert at the level we wanted or needed it to I can notice the way that I wanted to prevent my clients from experiencing pain and  here’s where it got really muddy because my dysregulation had me unconsciously consenting to being in this role, right, when one, that’s not in my power to control, and two, that was never a role that was mine to play, nor a role that any of my clients were putting me in. Okay? 

It was me. My old patterns that were getting triggered when I found myself in an all new level of success, and there was a very loud part of me that was saying, “don’t fuck this up”.

“Do not fuck this up. So much is riding on this”, and all of that pressure completely dysregulated me to going back to some old, tired, worked through shit, and I truly forgot that I was all I ever needed, and that who I am is truly enough  and it’s not in my power to prevent my clients from experiencing pain or disappointment or any of those things that we’re gonna experience along our business journey. But instead, it was my job to be able to sit with them in it. And that is clean energy, right? 

And so it has taken a long-ass 18 months. To come back home to that again, figure out where I got so twisted up with all of this, figure out why so much of this has felt so hard and heavy when I knew that there were some other dynamics that were coming into play with this, right.

Most of which I was creating myself. So it’s been a very interesting, mind trip to unpack all of these layers. And also when you go through periods of dysregulation, there is no like rule around how long you’re going to be in it.

Um, what it’s gonna take to get out of it, and how much distance you need from it to really see it for what it is, right? And so it’s taken me a second to get there, Which was another thing that I was beating myself up for.

And it’s almost kind of like when you are grieving and you just want to be through the grief process, but grief has a mind of its own right. And so does dysregulation. Like it’s not just turning on a light switch. It’s not just repeating some affirmations. It’s really getting underneath like, what is being activated here?

What are you so afraid of? Like what is happening right here, right now? And what stories are you telling yourself about this experience? And then what is getting hooked from old dynamics that you are bringing into your current season? Okay. This stuff is very layered, obviously. So what I can share, being on the flip side of all of this, is I look back and realize that one of my biggest fears really did come true.

I crumbled under this big leap of taking my business to a radically different level, but in truth, I really crumbled under the pressure that was also self-induced, not consciously.

And that’s the other thing I’ve had to offer a lot of compassion towards myself around. But I will say this, I am all the wiser for navigating this path, especially how to be mindful of the stories that take me out of trusting myself and the mindset work I always need to be doing.

Because that definitely went to the wayside when my dysregulation was telling me I simply just needed to tread water. Okay? So I don’t know if there’s a way to prevent dysregulation. I know that it’s going to happen, but I do know that there are ways that we can mitigate it. And there are also supports that we can put in place like therapists, coaches, colleagues, and friends.

But I really wanted to share a little bit more behind the scenes of the other side of this coin that maybe a lot of us don’t really see. And I think the reason that it’s really important to talk about this is that I have had many conversations these past 18 months of people who have become dysregulated in business for a multitude of reasons, and they feel all of this pressure to keep up the facade that everything’s great, everything’s awesome.

Oh my God, why wouldn’t you want this? Right? Because of that toxic culture that just seeps through everything in this online world, but one thing that I want people to know always and forever is that your human experience, you were never alone in that. And I have felt alone so many times these past 18 months just feeling like maybe I was the only one that was really challenged and holding this new level of success.

Like, isn’t it supposed to be all great, grand, and wonderful? Shouldn’t I be able to enjoy it? And meanwhile, I’m just over here feeling super dysregulated, us trying to figure out like, what is going on, right? It was a very confusing time and also like an emotionally challenging one.

There was so much vulnerability throughout that whole process. So if you happen to be in a dysregulated place and you feel this pressure to put on that facade, please lean into your connections and have these conversations because I promise your humanity needs to be witnessed and it needs to be held.

I am so, so incredibly grateful for my friends at Held Space for me these past 18 months and all of the times that I had to process things over and over and over again while I was like working it out, right? We need our people and we do not create success alone, but we definitely don’t hold it alone.

Okay. This is definitely a team sport, so I will leave us here for this episode of my friends, but one of the things I’m really, really grateful for is as long as it’s taken me to get back to this place of trusting myself again, I am so incredibly grateful for the perspective of realizing what was getting in the way of it to begin with, And also explicitly recommitting to my b d e, my big deal energy because it is always such a sal for your soul, my friends, to come back to your enoughness, to come back to your value, to come back to the magic that you bring.

So until next time, here’s to the courage to keep showing up even when clarity is still forming, knowing, trusting, believing. The next right step is always on its way. See you soon.