Today Patty takes on the concept of getting to the next level. When we’re talking about
this concept we’re usually talking about tangible results. More money, more clients,
more opportunities.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong any of those things. Our soul’s yearnings are
important, and Patty explains why we shouldn’t ignore them. She also shares how to
recognize when it’s what we really desire instead of what we think comes next.
What can you do when the “next level” isn’t exciting anymore? It’s a sign that you need
to make adjustments. Listen for her practical, next-leveling advice.
Connect with Patty: patty@pattylennon.com
Transcript
00:02 Welcome to the wealth and purpose podcast where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to creating wealth in a way that feels really good and live their purpose fully in the process. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex type-A corporate banker, turned intuitive business coach. I’m also a wife, a mom to two pre-teens, a professor, girl scout leader and well hey, you get it. Like you, I wear a lot of hats, whether you’re looking for inspiration to get started or strategies to get growing. I am here to help you create abundance in every area of your life in business. Welcome.
Well, hello. Hello there. So today I want to talk about getting to the “next level,” and I’m putting that in quotes because I think getting to the next level is so overused. It’s become trite, but. It’s as close as it comes to the feeling state that I think most of us are in at varying times of the year.
01:02 Either visioning a bigger dream for ourselves, putting it into action or enjoying the benefits of having finally gotten our dream off the ground. And then if you’re like me and most of my clients, you spend a nanosecond enjoying what you’ve created and then you’re off to the races coming up with the next thing for yourself. Now, the next level can be in career, in your business, but it can also be in life. There’s lots of things that can take you to what you consider to be the next level. What I found though is that typically when we’re talking about getting to the next level for ourselves, we’re usually talking about something tangible. Do we want more money in our business? We will have more impact in our business. We want to write a book, we want to speak in more stages, et Cetera, et Cetera, and there’s nothing wrong with those things because you know when our soul calls us in those directions, it’s because our soul knows what’s going to take us on the journey to allow us to fulfill our life purpose in the biggest way possible with the greatest amount of joy.
02:15 And so those yearnings that we feel are important and they’re not meant to be ignored. However, what I have seen, both in myself and most of my clients is that initially, especially for entrepreneurs, but I guess this happened back in my banking days as well. When you start reaching for something, a higher level, whatever that is, you can, and I have put things that are important to us on hold, put a pause button in them or turn down the heat on them. And by “heat” I mean the amount of attention we pay to them, the amount of joy we give them in deference to this next level. And this came up for a client this week, so it’s particularly alive for me because it’s, I think it’s really at the heart of what does it mean to have wealth as opposed to money. So you only, for this client it was about getting her business to the next level in terms of income.
03:21 And what happened was that as she was describing what was going on, I could see the things that had fulfilled her in the past had been put to the side. She had put a hold on things that really went into her own self-care and self-care, not just being something like having time for yourself or meditating or taking baths or getting massages. This is long term maintenance things that bring you joy. Anything that brings you joy is self-care. And so what had happened was slowly the joy had bled out of her existence, not in a massive way. She wasn’t in some deep depression. The symptom that she showed was that she just felt no excitement to go after something that had been really important to her in the past. And so often when a client comes to me, and they’ve hit a glass ceiling of a hundred and fifty thousand two hundred thousand three hundred thousand that that window, that glass ceiling will look like, I can’t get to seven figures or I can’t get to this level of impact, you know, this, whatever that is.
04:39 And they’ll feel like it’s this, it’s money or you know, people, clients or you know, whatever. Some number that, that person just doesn’t have the skill to get there. That’s the perception of for that person. And that’s why they come to me. But almost always what we find is that what happened was they ran too far down a road that was ultimately a dead end for them, meaning some piece of the puzzle that they used to create what they have right now, got them to a point where they just had no joy, and so they felt blah. And if you feel that block, that ambivalence or that apathy around your business, and believe me, I have been there many times, I promise you it’s not because you’re not making more money or having more impact. It’s because there is some fundamental basics that you lost track of.
05:39 And the cool thing is your soul always knows what you need to get back on track. Now, for my client I mentioned it was so cool because the next day she was like, oh my God, I know what it is. It’s yoga. I left yoga; I put it on hold. It was an essential part of my life, and all of a sudden, there just wasn’t time for it. And sometimes the answer isn’t as simple as it adding yoga back in, I’ll tell you, it can be, it can feel more complicated than that. It usually isn’t more complicated, and at least for me as the coach, it’s always pretty obvious. But as the person, so I’ll tell you from my own personal experience as being the one who was in the apathy who was in the block experience just because I can do it for others, I still can’t do it for myself.
06:28 So this isn’t about me knowing better. It’s just about, it’s easier for someone who understands how this works, to see it from the outside than to be in it. And so along the way, I came up with an equation, especially when I look at creating more profit in my business. If I’m going for a greater level of money in my business or that’s a goal, I always look at profit because you can always make more money and actually not be taking any of it home. And all that is is an ego number said something to be really careful of. But I specifically look at it in a three-tiered system. And so when I’m looking to grow, when I’m feeling the energy that it’s time to grow, I do it in this order. Can I sustain the amount of love I have in my life and grow it?
07:25 Then I look at time. So do I have a profit of time and then finally do I have a profit of money and I, and I always do it in that order. And what that translates to mean fundamentally is if I put in action what I’m thinking of doing, will it affect the amount of love I can give to myself and the love I can give to other people? Generally, I find that my clients do a pretty good job of making sure they’re taking care of their people, whether it’s your kids or a partner or other family members or your friends. I’m not talking about taking care of them. I’m talking about experiencing love. And that’s very different because you can be taking care of people that you love, but if you’re running on empty, it will feel like resentment. It will not feel like love.
08:21 And yet when you are full up, the same actions will feel like love. They will fulfill you when you give from an overflow. And so self-love is always the first place is will my self-love grow? Will, my ability to love myself grow in this journey. So in the journey of making more money in your business, typically it’s, at least with me and when I encourage my clients to look at it is money is a symptom of being of service to your people. So if you’re going to grow the money in your business, you’re going to grow the amount of service or if you want to grow the amount of money in your business, you want to look at how can I be of more service, to more people and then accept the love that’s coming to me in the form of money, in money, energy. So when you’re looking at that, you’re looking at being of more service.
09:20 Well, if you’re going to have a bigger impact on the people you came to serve, you’re going to experience that as love. If you’re doing it in a way that’s healthy for you, that’s right for you. And once you look at that and you’re doing it from that perspective, then it’s easy to see that the ability to love your people won’t get lost in the process. And then once you look at love and are you able to love yourself through this growth? Do you have enough time? Is the next question meaning is this growth plan sucking all the time out of your schedule? Because even if you can carve out some time to love yourself if you ultimately get a super crowded schedule and you’re working lots of hours, and it doesn’t feel good and your time can’t be spent where you really want it spent, then that is not a good growth plan.
10:18 And in fact, almost always with clients that come, they’ve hit a financial threshold in their business. They’ve had a glass ceiling in the money they can make. The first place we go is not to figure out how can I make more money or how can I help this person make more money? It’s, how can I get them back 10 hours in their week? Because almost always that’s the magic number. 10 hours gives a feeling of spaciousness. It actually reinvigorates that visioning muscle. It gives you that space to dream and create and start to really feel into the creative power within you. It’s that creative power that really has the wisdom to take you to the “next level”. And then once we’ve looked at, you know, is there enough love happening and do have a profit love. And then do you have a profit in time?
11:15 And also, by the way, profit of love is, are you able to do what you’re planning on doing without feeling like a bad person? Because if something you’re doing feels off and feels wrong to you, like not wrong, like it’s hard and I’m scared wrong, like this is not what a good person would do, then it gets a no immediately. Absolute NO, so you’ve looked at is there a profit of love and my love and my growth plan? Is there a profit of time in my growth plan? Then where can I create a profit of money in that order? And when you, whether you’re looking to grow your business to “the next level” or something to the next level, or you’re really just acting in the maintenance of your existence right now, looking at things in that order, we’ll get you the most joyful existence and the most financially profitable business.
12:18 And I’ve told this story before, and you’ve probably heard it if you’ve been with us for a while, but I will just share that where I came up with this equation where I started managing my life and my business this way was when I had hit a block in my own business. It was June; it was the halfway mark. That’s why I remember it. And I looked at the numbers in my business, and for the first time, I had hit six figures by the first half of the year. So I was on target too, more than double my revenue from the last year. And I was shocked because I just had concluded somewhere when I started my business that the money would solve the joy issues, meaning the money would bring me the time, and the money would bring me the happiness. And as I looked around my life, I was, I was tolerating so many things that had become intolerable.
13:17 I was working all the time. I was never focused on wherever I was. So when I was in my business, I was feeling bad about not spending more time with my family. And when I was with my family, I was feeling bad about not spending more time with my business. I had no clear direction and I was ready to give up and ultimately decided I’m not going to give up because I can still feel the truth of this business for me, but I’m, I’m going to figure out if I can do it the way that I, which feel good doing it. And if I can’t, I will trust that the university telling me it’s time to close the doors. And so I completely reorganized that business. And that was ultimately what led to a program. I call the 20 hour workweek, so I got my work week down to 20 hours.
14:02 Not because I don’t spend more time than 20 hours doing things for my business, but what I do is I only do work for 20 hours and then other hours I spend dreaming and walking and visioning, so I do a lot of the big thinking work outside those 20 hours, but 20 hours is how I functionally run my business and I realized that when I put that constraint on myself where I valued first my ability to love myself and care for my vision and care for meeting my people and then put the constraint on the time and said, I will have a profit of free time in this business. I had concluded, I mean fairly logically, that I’d probably start making less money. I was working 60 hours. If I was going down to 20 hours, there was a good chance I was going to have a really steep decrease in the money in my business.
14:57 That’s what I had concluded and what happened was I actually made even more money after that point because we’re taught to believe that our effort makes our money, but the reality is our vibration is really what calls it into our life. I’m a big believer in taking action and taking right action. I think that’s the part about being of service. You and I put a significant amount of time to create a free offer. Yes, it’s a lead generator. Most important to me is that it’s filled with love, that it is helpful in and of itself. And so everything that goes out into the world from me goes out with my confidence that it is filled with love, and that gets me excited to share it. And so then sharing it isn’t work sharing it is more love. And then when questions come in, and I take sales conversations, all of those start with a profit of love.
15:56 And when you do that, then what happens is the waves of the financial gifts flow in, and the more you focus on loving yourself, the more able you are to receive what’s coming. That’s really the inner and the outer game of sales is to start with love and then make sure you have a profit of time and from there a profit of money and so right now if you’re considering getting to the next level, especially if the next level is money, I really want you to to write those three levels down. Now I’m not suggesting you, you take on my value system, you may have a very different feeling about what is most important to you, and it’s up to you to decide what counts. I would just say if yours in this order is not love time and then money, figure out what the order is of most important to least important because the way that I came up with my structure was that love is the reason I’m here.
17:00 I truly believe it’s the reason we’re all here, but I know for a fact it’s the reason I’m here. So if love ever gets sacrificed, that is a sacrifice that can not happen, whether it’s self love or love for others. And then from there, time is something that, I mean, aside from the fact that time is an illusion, et Cetera, et Cetera, and that we can all bend time and all of that, but if we’re playing on the planet, Earth, time is something that we can’t get back, right? Money is the one thing out of that list that’s replaceable. You could be down to $0 dollars, and you could get back to where you were with right action. I promise you. But the love, when you sacrifice love, or you sacrifice time, that is not something that you can replace. You can make up for it in the future for sure.
17:52 So I don’t want you to feel any regret. God knows I made some pretty pretty bad decisions as far as that scorecard is concerned in my past. And you want to get over that real quick. You want to have forgiveness for yourself because that comes in the love category. The thing is, money’s the thing that’s replaceable. And if you don’t have “enough money”, it will affect the love and the time category. I understand that completely and so there is a reason to focus on creating it, but really honor what’s most important to you and make your scorecard and then make your growth plans according to your scorecard. My scorecard is love first, then time, then money. What’s yours? Figure it out, and you’re welcome to have mine cause I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s been, it’s been honed over many years, and I’ve worked with lots and lots of clients using this focus, and I can tell you that the results are miraculous because really love is the source of our miracles.
18:58 Love is a source of magic. Time and money are the illusions we play with on this planet to have the human experience. I don’t know what the right answer is for you right now. If this is something that you were contemplating and thinking, Oh yeah, I feel like I feel worn out. I feel apathetic about success. I’ve hit a glass ceiling, and I want more, but I don’t know how to get it. I don’t know exactly what the right answer is for you, but I can tell you if you start with, am I taking good enough care of myself? In the complete sense and the whole sense, not just your physical body, but your whole self. And then am I able to love the people I want to love? If you just start with those two questions, I believe you will find some answers that you didn’t expect and I can tell you’ve proof in my journey that when I thought by following what I needed and what might what I needed to give fully to the people I love, I thought when I went after that that I would lose money in the exchange.
20:08 So if you’re having that thought, I promise you that’s not necessarily the equation that will happen. And in fact, my experiences that the more yourself love grows, the more money will come into your life. I’m so curious if this helps you. I love to hear stories about people who have made changes to their business using this philosophy or this, this approach. So if you have an experience from this or you have an experience in your own life where you made a similar choice, please share it with me. I Love, love hearing from you. You can email me at patty@pattylennon.com, and if you feel like you need some help with this in your business, if you want to work with me, I would love to talk to you about that. Again, just email me, patty@pattylennon.com, and we’ll set up some time to talk and see if I’m the right coach for you or the right solution for you. I’m probably even if I’m not; I will know one that is so have a fantastic day and may love build your world today.
21:19 Hey, thanks for listening. And if you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this podcast with them. And if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps us reach many more people, and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you had to say about what you heard, I am cheering for your success. Have an amazing day.
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