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Shownotes:

Hey, hey TBD Fam!

We’re cruising along with our 5-part series as we break down the D.R.E.A.M. of DreamMoney™ and this week, we’re talking all about Ease.

Come to find out, I have a lot to share on this because Ease has not been easy for me! We’re kicking off a 3-4 part episode series on just this concept alone, especially:

1. What ease is and isn’t.  This is where we’re starting today. 
2. Creating financial systems that add clarity because if we want something to feel easeful, there needs to be organization and a system that isn’t overwhelming. 
3. Ease around earning.  How we can create more ease for revenue to come in – but I’ll go ahead and tell you – ease does not mean doing nothing and poof – money arrives.  But there are definitely strategic ways for ease to be part of the plan and I’m excited to dive into this one. 
4. And lastly, I know I want to talk about mastery because when we think about things that feel easeful – there’s a lot of comfortability, confidence, routine here and I want to talk about how we specifically create it! 

So, let’s dive into what Ease is and isn’t today!

I’m sharing:

• My personal journey with this core value and all the 4-letter words its brought up along the way.
• The things that interrupt ease and what to do instead.
• And the difference between ease, effort, and efforting.

You ready? Let’s dive in!

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Austin Kleon Books
• Leveraging the Universe by Mike Dooley
• Add your name to be a DreamMoney™ Blueprint launch supporter!

I’ll be leading a free DreamMoney™ Masterclass on Wednesday, September 13th @ 1pm CST. This will be such a great event to invite your friends to come learn this framework and see the financial clarity the DreamMoney™ Blueprint can add to their business.

Transcript:

Hello, hello my friends and welcome back to TBD!  Whew, this week has been a week already with school starting back tomorrow, flag football starting last week, wrapping up the recent Flow Accelerated enrollment, and getting quite a few ducks in a row for the new DreamMoney Blueprint launch that is happening in just 5 weeks.  

I have a photoshoot coming up in 2 weeks, which I’m so excited about!  You know that feeling you get when you reach that place in your brand when you just want new everything?  New fonts, new logo, new photos, new palette, new copy?  Yep – I’m there!  And although this upcoming shoot is not for my current brand, it’s for the Software company I’m starting for DreamMoney, I’m so excited for just some fresh visuals coming in somewhere!  

I cannot wait to do a brand refresh for Megan Hale Co later on this year.  So many fun things!  And fun fact, did you know that my current Megan Hale logo was designed all the way back in 2015?!  Y’all… that’s like 2 decades in internet years.  So all to say – it’s going to feel so good when I can do some brand refresh over here, but I know at least getting a brand direction for DreamMoney is going to give me a little bit of creative resolve to tide me over.  

So this week on the podcast, we are chugging along over here breaking down the D.R.E.A.M. of DreamMoney as I started to reflecting on the E, which is all around Easeful Money – I knew we were going to need a few episodes just to dive into this one.  

So, Easeful money will likely be 3, maybe 4 episodes because I have a lot to say and share on this one! 

Before we dive in though, I did want to point you to the show notes in case you want to add your name to the list of supporters who are willing to spread the word about the DreamMoney Blueprint launch 5 weeks from now. 

I’ll be sending out all the details soon, but what I can share is I’ll be leading a free DreamMoney Masterclass on September 13th at 1pm CST to walk people through the D.R.E.A.M. of DreamMoney and how the Blueprint intentionally supports each piece.  I’ll be doing a behind the scenes demo of all the profit planning tools inside and everyone will be getting access to the Leap Number calculator that I delivered two weeks ago in Leap Week, which helps you calculate exactly how much money your business needs to earn to fund your 7 key financial needs.  I’m so excited for people to get a real taste of what the DreamMoney Blueprint can do in their business and there’s no better way than to let people experience it.  

Which reminds me, this concept of letting people experience your work is something I’m pretty sure is a core concept in Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.  He also wrote Steal Like an Artist, which is around unlocking creativity.  Now – truth be told, I have not gotten through both of these books. They’ve been sitting in my library for a couple of years now – but the main concepts are simple to implement and super helpful for getting out of your own way!  

So – DreamMoney Masterclass on September 13th at 1pm!  That’s our big event you’ll want to invite your people to so they can see the DreamMoney Blueprint in action, but also learn this framework that is really a deeper invitation to not just get into your numbers and margins and revenue plan, but to really integrate a financial system and hub into your business that makes money soulful, personal, and meaningful that shifts so so much for how money feels!! 

Add you name in the shownotes if you’re willing to share the word. I so appreciate your help with this! I’ve never gone for something this big in my entire life and every single share helps so much!!  

Okay – now… Easeful money.  You ready?  

Because what I know I want to dive into when it comes to ease are 4 key things: 

1. What ease is and isn’t.  And this is where we’re starting today. 
2. Creating financial systems that add clarity because if we want something to feel easeful, there needs to be organization and a system that isn’t overwhelming. 
3. Ease around earning.  How we can create more ease for revenue to come in – but I’ll go ahead and tell you – ease does not mean doing nothing and poof – money arrives.  But there are definitely strategic ways for ease to be part of the plan and I’m excited to dive into this one. 
4. And lastly, I know I want to talk about mastery because when we think about things that feel easeful – there’s a lot of comfortability, confidence, routine here and I want to talk about how we specifically create it!  

So – just a few juicy threads there to get us going!  But I think the reason I intentionally have always included ease as a core value of mine is because ease does not come easy to me.  It’s been something I’ve had to work on deeply over the years and it’s still something I’m building mastery in.  Ease has never been my MO.  And so in this way, this key pillar of DreamMoney really holds me in the integrity of my own work because if I’m here to help more people fine more ease with their money, that means I have to be modeling that for myself.  And just as an aside here for all my values-driven listeners – values can be tricky when you lead with them because it’s so easy to hold yourself to a standard of embodying or practicing them or being in alignment with them to this degree of perfection. 

And if you’ve ever found yourself here, you know just how easy it is to feel that sense of imposter syndrome when you’re preaching a value, but not practicing it yourself.  So… let me give you a little love note here. 

Values aren’t meant to make you feel like shit when you life moves you away from them in all the 9 million ways that can happen.  Especially if a value isn’t your MO.  Your values are your northstars- something you’re always bringing yourself back to.  And your people never need you to practice a value with perfection.  In fact, the more ways you can find your way back to a value, the more valuable that value becomes to YOU, but the more wisdom you have to share with your people for how they can come back to that value too. 

So just as an aside – ease is a core value of mine, but I don’t practice it perfectly.  There are times when I try and force vs allow, I try and control vs. trust, I push an arbitrary deadline my ego decided on vs. giving myself permission to create more space.  

And I would imagine you find yourself there too.  Ease, much to my dismay and likely to yours too, is not easy.  Ease is the hardest value I’ve ever worked on because it requires so much trust, so much surrender, so much allowing.  And none of those processes are ones us humans typically like.  Because they’re vulnerable!  And ease, my friends, can be quite the vulnerable exploration at the beginning, but it does get more comfortable over time.  

So what is ease?  To me ease is when you’re allowing things to flow organically.  There’s not much muscling or pushing or struggling.  It’s an absence of tension.  It’s almost like a red carpet just rolled out for you and all you have to do is walk.  

I know you’ve had that experience of sitting down to write and there’s nothing but a blinking cursor staring back at you for hours and/or your delete key is your best friend.  And you’v also had that experience of sitting down to write and literally it’s effortless.  The right words just pour through.  And you got more done in less time when you wrote from a place of ease than you did the hours you spent trying to force it to come through.  

Let me take you back to 2015 when Danielle LaPorte’s truthbombs were all the rage and I was still in that place where I was starstruck by these spiritual women entrepreneurs who were making such a big impact wondering if one day that could be me too.  

Back then, I used to write little love notes on those truthbombs and leave them in bathrooms of restaurants I’d visit.  I’d drop a few on the ground to be found by someone else.  I’d send them in cards to friends.  Because I really loved the little reminders.  And there was one in particular that I kept just for me.  It said, “Let it be easy.”  

Now, come to find out – ease and easy are two different things.  Ease does not mean the absence of effort or putting in the time.  Ease most definitely needs something to grab onto. But even the concept of letting something be easy brought up all kinds of resistance that was the antithesis to my idea of work ethic at the time.   

I sat that truthbomb on my desk right in front of my computer so I could see it everyday as I sat down to my business.  

And for a whole year, those words stared back at me.  Let it be easy.  

But how?  

How do you let things be easy?  That was the biggest question that year. Because up to this point in both my life & business, I was used to hustling to get things done.  I was a hard worker and an over-worker and I was also someone who tended to lean on productivity and marking something off a to-do list to cope with my anxiety.  As long as there was progress, there was a way I could “control” in air quotes an outcome.  

The problem, of course, is that I knew relatively early on in my business that there would always be a long to-do list to get done.  So ease couldn’t be something I rewarded myself with because I would never get to a place of its full arrival.  Instead, I knew I needed to shift the way I was relating to things.  

Let it be easy. First, I had to trust that something could be easy.  And that was a much deeper exploration on worthiness than I was expecting. Why should things be easy for me?  Why did I deserve it?  And more so, if something came easy – would it feel just as accomplished?  

In Spring 2016, I went into my first launch with the commitment of letting ease lead.  That meant that I promised myself I would not force, I would not hustle, I would not push.  Instead, I would trust, i would soften, I would allow.  

This was around the same time I found Mike Dooley’s Leveraging the Universe that held an exercise that was so helpful at the time. It still is.  There’s this triangle model where the top represents your goal.  You then draw a line down the middle where on the left is everything you need to do and can do in order to reach your goal. The right represents everything the Universe needs to do to help you reach your goal.  

This very simple diagram was such a profound insight for me at the time around partnering with the Universe and powers that be.  Believing in synchronicity, putting my faith in the knowing that things were orchestrating in my favor, and deepening into the belief that the Universe had my back.  

I had my to-do list.  But the Universe also had theirs.  Let it be easy. 

Ease that launch looked like not forcing my way through sales copy, which required so much trust that the words would flow through.  I remember the first time I really put ease to the test.  I had sales copy that had to get done within 24 hours and as I sat down to write – things were just not flowing.  Let it be easy.  If I wanted ease to lead, I had to let it.  Which meant getting up and walking away so more ease could flow in. 

I went for a walk instead.  Clearing my head.  Hoping the words would come so I could get it done before tomorrow. I sat down to write and nothing.  Let it be easy.  Trust it could be easy.  

My anxiety was rising because of the deadline.  I don’t have time to waste.  It has to happen.  I could hear the way my anxiety was pushing me to hustle and push through because time was slipping away.  But I resisted it.  Even though it was highly uncomfortable.  

Let it be easy.  Trust it could be easy.  I went to bed that night without marking this big task off of my to-do list knowing there would be just a few hours to get it done in the morning.  What it things still didn’t flow?  I didn’t have time to wait on ease.  I breathed through it. 

The next morning I sat down to write and everything flowed through me.  The copy I’d spent hours trusting would come through if I let it and didn’t force it came right through.  It took an hour.  My deadline was reached.  With ease.  Except for all the wrestling I’d done trusting it could be easy.  Whew… trust, surrender, allowing – all 4 letter words to me at the time. 

I’d just completed my first task of letting something be easy though.  What I learned is if I’m forcing it – I have to get up and walk away.  I have to trust the time away is exactly what I need and ease can collapse time on the other side if I let it. 

With the copy done, then it was time to market.  What did marketing with ease look like?  It looked like not forcing myself to show up “consistently”, but instead only when I felt called.  That the more I allowed this, the more potency my content would hold and the more it would land and resonate with my people.  

This would mean fewer posts though, fewer opportunities for visibility, fewer people seeing my offer when I wanted it to sell out.   It also meant not watching posts for engagement, but trusting they were getting the response I wanted from them. A watched post never performs anyway.  

I remember grounding down into the belief that when I speak, people listen. It isn’t about being the loudest in the room.  It’s about being the clearest, the most heart-felt, the most connected and trusting that if I showed up from this place – one deep post could outperform mere quantity.  I remember trusting too that the Universe would help the right people see my message.  That was up to the Universe to do.  Which maybe back in the golden age of 2015 was also the algorithm too, but I digress.  

That launch ended up bringing in 6 clients when I really wanted 12.  I didn’t reach my goal, but I did experience ease.  That wasn’t easy because there was so much fear leaning back and trusting something else.  But it showed me if I could get to a halfway sold out launch doing things in this new way, I could get to a sold out launch too.  And I’ve been leaning into ease ever since.  

Challenging myself to get up and walk away when I feel that fear and hustle rising. Trusting my intuition will come through with the right words, the right idea if I stop micro-managing it while still honoring a deadline.  Challenging myself to trust something bigger is always orchestrating in the background and even if the algorithm isn’t working in my favor, the right people will always see my work, my message at the right time for them.  Challenging myself to extend a deadline if it’s creating too much hustle, too much force, too much stress and that giving myself more time will end in a better result even though that may delay revenue during a tighter revenue month. 

I’ve found over and over again that we make up these ideas that XYZ has to happen in a certain time-frame when in reality, it’s simply an ideal.  We’d prefer not to have to dip into savings for one more month, for example, or we don’t want things to be so tight – so we push, we hustle, we put all this pressure on our businesses because we decide it’s time.  When in reality – we could make it just fine because we’ve done it before. We simply don’t want to.  

And, on the other hand, there are times when we make a new non-negotiable for ourselves in our businesses where we say “NO MORE”.  No more lean months.  No more leaning back.  No more not going for it.   And sometimes, this can be exactly what we need to call more ease in BUT it has to be from a place of partnership, surrender, and devotion.  

Because underneath that non-negotiable is willingness.  Willingness to be with the challenge, the set backs, the not flowing – and instead of getting frustrated, we soften.  We notice.  We love our intuition through it and we commit to giving ourselves what we need.  And I’ve found over and over again that this is how we usher in a new normal that may hold tension, but we also usher in more ease.  Because of that willingness.  Not from a place of ego or sacrifice, but from a place of commitment to dance with that tension, working with it instead of against it. Taking a step back when that tension rises and coming back to it and trying again after resting, playing, nourishing.  

If we want to step into easeful money, we have to let money feel easy.  Which means a couple of things – the way we’re earning money needs to be grounded in ease.  You can force your way and hustle your way to all the money you want.  But you’ll likely be burned out.  Or you can give yourself generous timelines, which helps immensely.  Especially if you have anxiety like me.  

You can stop hustling to prove yourself.  That always helps.  When you’re grounded in enoughness, that definitely ushers in ease.  

You can also realize when you’re forcing something from a place of “you have to happen” vs. allowing something to happen because you trust it’s on its way. 

Stepping into easeful money also means realizing there’s a difference between effort and efforting.  The online space has done such a fucked up job of convincing everyone that business success can happen without effort.  That it’s doing one simple thing and poof – success. And I often see people who have a season that’s full of consistent effort.  We’re building bodies of work that require our asses in seat.  That require a lot of pouring out of our wisdom that will challenge us to wrap our brain around how we best want to teach something. 

Business is full of lots of effort.  The easiest way to edge ease out is to wish effort didn’t have to be such a big part of creating your dreams. 

Be willing to put in the effort.  Sustainable effort though, which means realizing when you’re adding too much effort at the same time to your plate.  You control those things.  And it is especially easy to start putting more on your plate when the money is coming in because the fears can rise up that you have to strike while the iron is hot. Or put all this pressure on yourself to deliver your 3.0 version when you’re in the process of creating your version 1.  Let things be minimum viable and grow from there.  Be mindful here.  Because saying yes to too much or expecting the impossible can quickly shift from effort to efforting.  

Ease is something that is always available.  Always. And to me, it will always come back to trust, surrender, and allowing.  Fear is the easiest way to edge ease out because it edges the Universe out.  It puts you on an island all alone and has you believing that everything is resting on your shoulders, you have to figure it out and you have to figure it out right now.  

But when we can soften that fear, trust it’s all working out, trust ourselves more importantly that we can figure something out – this is what invites in that deep exhale, when we start to relax, and we start to ground down into the “I can’s” and “it’s happening”.  

I mean seriously try that on for size right now.  What does it feel like in your body when you’re in the energy of I can, I got this, it’s happening.  Do you feel that space that starts to open up, the way your shoulders relax or your jaw unclenches.  

That’s ease.  And those words and those beliefs are always just a breath away.  

So, my friends, I’ll leave us here for Part I of Easeful Money, which is really calling more ease in.  Which is allowing, trusting, surrendering – those 4 letter words so many of us want to love, but struggle to. But truly, if we want earning money to feel easeful, we have to work from a place of ease which requires effort – but not efforting.  

It’s noticing the pressure we’re putting on ourselves and when that pressure is coming from a place of fear.  It’s noticing the timelines we’re giving ourselves that may need to be more generous than we want or are comfortable with. 

But more so, it’s devoting yourself to the commitment to ground down into more ease.  Let things be easy.  Trust they can be.  And make more space to breathe.  

Until next time, my friends, 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!