This is a story about allowing yourself to be the visionary you are. About defying conventional wisdom, and allowing yourself to speak to the elements in your work that matter most.
When Aine came to work with me last fall, she was in a place a lot of people would envy. She had an easy, lucrative, boutique financial mentoring business. She got all of her clients through word-of-mouth and referrals. The way she describes it, “I could have kept on that path. Continued doing what I was doing. Be grateful for the success I had. But, my soulful passion and purpose kept calling me to something bigger.
My existing business was based on only one part of a much larger vision I had of how we can all make informed, conscious choices, not just about our money, but about our health, our communities, our economy. Most coaches I met said ‘you have to just talk about the money program because it’s clear and concrete’.
It was very frustrating. I couldn’t see how to communicate in a way that went beyond the money work. I had the overall quilt design in my head, but the way I was showing up in the world, it was like I was starting in the left hand corner.
I wanted to disseminate the wisdom of the foundational work, but then I didn’t know how to segue into the other programs I saw I could offer. Most coaches advised me that I shouldn’t even think about talking about those other areas until I had fully developed those offers into programs. I also struggled to describe the complexity of my whole systems, inner-outer approach to wealth.
This challenge made me not want to network or go out into the world, because being asked what I do was always an awkward moment. I had a cool name, a tag line, but when someone asked “how do you do that?” it felt wrong to talk just about my money mentoring. It felt incomplete and too small.
I was in this holding pattern for a very long time. I would remind myself, ‘ You don’t have to hustle, you don’t have to market. Why aren’t you satisfied?’ But my soul kept going ‘wait, there’s more’. ”
Aine had worked with me eight years earlier when she was establishing her financial mentoring services. We had worked to put together a True Spirit statement that captured the depth of her work. At first, she felt like the True Spirit was too big, too impossible, but over the years, Aine says, “I grew into it”. So, she had some trust that I could help her hold onto and speaking to the larger, and emerging, vision of the difference her work could make.
What made all the difference for Aine was finally being encouraged to tie her money work into that larger vision of a world where more of us are making holy and healthy choices about how we live, how we use our energy, how we use our resources. The feedback I gave her reflected back the validity of what she wanted to put forward, not the usual feedback that she was too much of an idealist. She realized, “I am a cultural healer, and my work changes perceptions of money and wealth, not just what we think of as wealth, but how our culture is built to support this new vision of true wealth and well-being.”
She says, “what I got is that THAT is where the potency is. The Big Why of why I teach what I teach is what fuels me to go out in the world. I have the right to share my larger vision. When I just talk about managing your finances, I lose juice.”
With this new frame in mind, she reviewed seven years’ worth of material she’d written, and found all this strong, potent, on point writing. She says, “I knew back then WHAT I should say but not WHY. I’ve always known my larger vision, but I didn’t have permission to talk about it.
As soon as I started to own this, step into this, communicate my larger vision, I went into a whole other level of becoming. I am owning all of these archetypes: the Truth Teller, the Crone, the King. It’s like I’ve turned on the spigot.
I need to share what I see without weighing in first on how it’s going to be received. I am giving myself power to be and let go of people-pleasing and needing to be liked and trying to fit in. I am moving past 65 years of conditioning. I don’t care anymore if you like what I have to say. Either, don’t listen or come join me. I am speaking to people who are hungry for this way of seeing what is happening in the world.
What I see is that my work around financial sovereignty is part of addressing the larger question of how we become a better collective. Without the Mojo training, I’d be farting around, resigning myself to what I was doing, and keeping my interest in social justice separate. I now have a recognition for myself that I am prepared for this large vision. I can lead it, inspire it, seed it, I don’t need to do it all myself.”
In addition to wrapping her arms around this bigger vision, Aine also found clear, practical language to talk about her work shifting people’s approach to money management and financial choices.
In working on her True Wisdom, I encouraged her to more clearly define her terms, what she meant by “intimate, informed, and conscious choices” or “your Ecstatic Enough” or Intimate Sovereignty. She says, “Now I have an entire lexicon, I don’t use normal words and phrases because I am trying to change cultural myths. I am giving people new language so I can give people a different world view.”
Aine was able to take some of the phrases from her foundational language, her True Spirit and True Wisdom, and start to use them when people asked her what she does. Phrases like “design and develop your own financial sovereignty” OR “support your business in a holy and grounded way”
What she noticed is that at public events, she would throw these potent phrases out and some people would glaze over, but the ones who didn’t would sit up, eyes wide, and say ‘tell me what that is!’ Using the language and phrases we’d worked on, she could move into why it’s necessary. ‘This is a whole new phase in the collective consciousness, we each have to decide what is right, healthy, and holy and make every choice based on that. We are in transition from an Empire to a new form of society that honors individuated sovereignty needed for effective collaborative unity.’ What she saw is that the right people, her people, would get it and love it and eat it up, and others would be really clear it wasn’t for them.
Now, when calls come in from referrals, she can, as she describes it, “go boom, boom, boom, and talk about it. If someone challenges what I say, I can respond without feeling awkward. ‘Here’s why I do it the way I do it.’ I am calling the right people in. If someone says to me, ‘I just want to do the numbers’, I can respond ‘No, you won’t sustain your new habits, your growth, your Vision without the Vision inner awareness and deprogramming work.’
Aine says, “I used to think if I couldn’t explain what I did to EVERYONE, I wasn’t doing a good job. I realized I don’t have to. I only need to explore what I do with the people who light up when they hear me speak.
What I would say to anybody who has a large vision and is doubting that it is possible to talk about it, know that it’s so important to connect to and speak to that larger vision, because it will juice you and give you the energy to take your next steps.”
She says, “Through your training, I became more coherent. While I was healing from mold poisoning and doing NO outreach, I had more clients than ever. I wasn’t even posting on Facebook about my work. I was posting about social justice. I am getting more clients, I’ve turned people away. I am literally embodying what my true work is. There is an energetic magnetic that is happening. “
She concludes, “This clear communication is what my dreams have been telling me about dissemination. It’s not about me, it’s the message I want to bring to the world.”
You can follow Aine on Facebook at Aine Dee (https://www.facebook.com/aine.dee.1) or find more about Wealth Reimagined at https://www.facebook.com/WealthReimagined/ and www.wealthreimagined.com.