Patty shares how she became a purpose-driven entrepreneur. It’s a big part of her journey.
The energy around what you’re creating as you build your business (the actual experience) is what you’ll have when you hit your goal. If the process includes stress and doesn’t provide the time freedom you desire, that’s going to be part of your future. It’s part of what you are creating.
Enter the dysfunctional fairytale. The belief that things will magically end up being the ideal we hope for, even when the journey doesn’t reflect that.
Patty shares how she realized that the future she wanted didn’t match up with her reality. That’s when she knew she had to make a change. Hear how she figured out how to work less and make more.
This isn’t a how-to checklist. Patty shares her choice to operate from her soul. To honor that part first, in favor in peace of mind and time with her children.
Today’s episode will help you understand how to operate from your soul’s desire.
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, I must say I am a little surprised at the interesting conversations I’ve been having with people as a result of last week’s podcast. So last week I talked about the equation that I built my profit margins on and basically what I focus on in my business now, which is very different than when I started, is, of course, I like more profits in my business, but I seek profits in the order of love first, then time, then money and you can listen to last week’s podcast if you didn’t already for that to make sense.
(01:18) But essentially what I’ve said is, I no longer make choices to grow my business or do anything in my life around money to increase money if love or time is sacrificed in the process. It doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give my time and effort to create more money. I do, of course I do, but if ultimately there’s not enough profit of joy that comes from the time I’m investing and it’s not feeding something higher in me that is excited to keep going forward, then the money potential doesn’t add up for me, and I got to this place because I walked a very different path. You know, I killed myself building my business in the beginning, got to a place where I was exhausted and although I was making what many would be considered a good amount of money in my business, I didn’t have any of the things I thought would come along with that, like freedom of time and energy.
(02:18) And you know, I don’t know, I’ve heard people talk about the flip flop lifestyle and just all of these ideals that I thought money would just naturally create, and it didn’t. I just created more of what I already had, which was a lot of work and stress. And so it wasn’t until I chose something different that my business started to reflect those different choices. And I think that we get to this place where we’re doing all of this work to create this money and yet not experiencing the whole reason we’re doing it, which for most of us, the reason we want more money is to have more time with the people we love. More time with ourselves. More time with more exciting experiences. At least this is generally what I found. And the thing is, if you’re just working really hard to create that money almost from this fear-based place, you never get to experience all those things that supposedly the money was going to bring you.
(03:18) And you know there’s, there’s many spiritual teachings around vibration and law of attraction and, and essentially at the core of that is the energy and the experience you’re having to build your future is what you’re bringing into the future. So if you are doing all of this work to create money or a different lifestyle, but the experience you’re having in doing it is one of stress and overwork. When you get to the finish line, you’ll just have stress and overwork. That’s actually what you’re creating no matter what you believe you’re actually creating. And it sets us up for this dysfunctional fairy tale life where we’re kind of living like Cinderella, right? We’re, we’re working hard in the evil step. Mother is just the the being or the the arc type within us that tells us to keep working and working and working to get back to deserving, which is where we Cinderella started originally.
(04:19) She was this loved daughter, and then her father is no longer in the picture. And the stepmother is you working her to the bones, and then you know, then a fairy godmother is going to come along and create this fairy tale existence at some point in our future. And for many people, I see that there is this belief in this, a magical force that’s going to bestow upon us beautiful manifestations and you know; I think that there is a force that will do that and it’s the God force. It’s the divine, but the divine is within us. You know, it’s not a force outside of ourselves. exclusively like we have it within us, and it’s outside of us, and it’s our engagement with that divine force, and it’s allowing that divine force to lead us. I call it, you know, letting your soul lead you that will create your highest experience of your life on this planet.
(05:22) But where are the fairy tale kind of comes into play? And I think we’re gets in the way is there is a moment, and there’s many moments, but in each pursuit, right? When you’re growing your business, let’s say, or pursuing a relationship or you’re trying to achieve a health goal. Let’s say there’s a moment on that path where you have to release what you concretely know will “work” and surrender to, essentially chaos. I mean, it isn’t chaos because it’s the divine and the divine understands how it all plays out, but to our human self it looks like chaos and for the human self to surrender to the chaos in favor of what this divine plan that looks like, chaos can bring is extremely scary, and the problem with the Cinderella storyline is that there’s really no point in time where Cinderella is faced with a fear-based choice where she has to surrender to something.
(06:40) She’s basically given the ball gown and given all the cool things and given the rules that she needs to follow, et Cetera, et cetera. That’s not how it actually works to have this greater life manifested for you. What happens is you are your own fairy godmother. You are the one who creates that greater existence, whether it’s in your business or your life or relationships and you’re walking your path, and there’s a moment where you have to surrender to what you know in favor for what’s possible and that you don’t know at all. And most people, falter at that moment, I have, and I’ve watched others do it too, and you know we get to practice at this over and over and over again so that we do get it down and we learned to trust this divine force within us. Trust our soul. Trust, love.
(07:44) And one of the challenges that I see we face, especially if you have lived and studied in the world of self-help and especially spiritually oriented self-help stuff, a lot of law of attraction stuff is you do steps one, two and three and you’re guaranteed, you know whatever it is. And a lot of times that whatever it is is more money or you know, car or whatever and that’s not surrender. That’s when you are doing something, and you’re “surrendering”. But you’re surrendering in the hopes of getting more money like you’re doing it, but only conditionally you’re doing it. Having you know almost this like tacit agreement. You’re between your brain and your soul where your brain is like, all right, I’ll go along with this surrender, but only because you told me it’s guaranteeing us more money or only because you’re guaranteeing us more time, whatever it is.
(08:42) When we go into it with that tacit agreement, that’s not real surrender in which case there’s no real courage being summoned and one of the stories, I think I told it last week, I know I’ve told it before, but I’ve been telling it in conversations with people as conversations had been happening because of last week’s podcast where you know, I had gotten to a point in my business. Where as of the middle of the year, I had made six figures. And so that was a real telling part of my journey because at that moment I was on track to become a multi six-figure business that year for the first time I thought a multi six-figure business owners life looked a certain way and mine did not look like that. I was stressed, I was overworked, you know, there was nothing good that came from that. Well, I mean, there was a lot of goodness that came from it.
(09:37) There was a lot of service happening. But the pursuit of that money did not get me the things that I thought it was going to get me, which was, you know, more ease, more time with the people I love more feeling of freedom to do the work and that I came to do in the world. I felt like I was constantly chased by the shadow of this force that was saying, you’re not doing enough. You’re not doing enough, do more, do more. And, um, I thought there was an amount of money that we’d eventually silence that voice, but there isn’t the the only way you silence that shadow that’s chasing you is to turn around and stare it down and say screw you, go away. And that comes from stopping and really taking stock of what’s going on and making some conscious choices, which is what I talked about last week is the choices I make are in the order of love than time, than money, money being the last because it’s the one that can be replaced always.
(10:35) It’s interesting because that story about that point in time eventually led me to rebuild my business on 20 hours a week and some other really great things that I’m proud of. And I created a course called the 20-hour workweek. And so there are times where I’m booked to give talks about the 20-hour workweek and what it means and et cetera. And I always find it fascinating that especially for people who’ve taken the course and then brought me into their organizations to talk about the concept of the 20-hour workweek and what it really means. They tell the story of my journey introducing me. They tell a story that you know, I you got to this low point. I realized I want something different. Create it the 20-hour workweek and made more money in the process. Right, and that is true.
(11:31) That’s an accurate statement. But the problem with bringing it down to that small of a story is that it takes away all of the fear that I experienced. It takes away all of the down on my knees having to really face my demons and all the the ugly, messy work that occurred in that timeframe. And it’s not, I mean, there’s no easy way to tell that story, right? The hero’s journey, the heroine’s journey is one that involves your dark night of the soul and the dark night of the soul. Other than saying you had a dark night of the soul, isn’t something that can be easily conveyed in a brief introduction of someone? But when I give those talks and when someone’s understood that, that’s my story. I really try and clarify very quickly. The thing about giving up those hours in my business and deciding consciously that I was going to work 20 hours a week.
(12:32) When I made that choice, I believed that I would end up making less money, which was really hard for me because I had been a high earner in corporate America and I had expected to be a high earner in my business, and I had every intention when I launched my business to growing it to seven figures and perhaps beyond. But when I launched my business, seven figures seemed like the exciting angle. And so to take a step back and say I’m willing to forgo a multi six-figure business in favor of peace of mind and having more time with my kids and taking better care of myself, that was not an easy choice like my soul and my human self wrestled and I was devastated and I grieved and it was hard. But ultimately I said, I deserve better than this. I deserve better than what I’m giving myself, and I’m going to figure this out, and I trust that eventually I will be able to care for my family properly and maybe great wealth isn’t part of my future.
(13:52) I believed it was possible. I believe all things are possible in the divine, but in that moment I was willing to trade quality of life for money because I thought that that was the, I thought that was the trade-off, and that is where the point of courage is. When people take the 20-hour workweek now, and they hear my story, when you jump into it, and you don’t actually confront your brain’s fear that if you work less hours, you will make less money or you will be less valuable or any of those things. If you don’t actually face those demons within yourself, then you’re not going to get the same results. Like if you buy the course hoping that you’re going to just follow the course and and you’re going to then have a 20-hour workweek and make a lot more money and that’s the only reason you’re agreeing to walk the path, then you’re not in true surrender.
(14:54) Now, so far, the people that have taken the course have experienced that they have experienced having more time back in their week, as well as being able to make more money. But even as I walk through the course with people, I’m always reminding them that, look, your life has to come first. Your Life. You have to be willing to honor life. And by that, I mean love and your time over money. And that’s something that’s the opposite of the equation that we’ve been taught. And if you’re waiting for a magical fairy godmother to come down and take you from servitude into this fairy tale existence without you having to face your demons and despite fear, walk into the future you want for yourself using all the courage you can muster. If you think that’s going to happen, that fairy tale is going to happen. It’s not.
(15:59) It’s not because the universe wants us. The divine wants us to understand the power of love, which means overcoming the human ego construct. Right before we were here on the planet and we were soul and just a soul without that human body and that human mind, all things were possible, and so that got boring after a while. The reason we come here is to have the adventure of having the illusion that we’re separate from what we desire, that we are not the divine creatures, we actually are, that we are not able to create everything we imagined. But if we then try and leapfrog over that human journey and just get back to the place where our souls who are in heaven or before we come to the planet, where manifestation is easy, and we just need to consider something, and we can manifest it there before us, and there is no contrast, and everything is love.
(17:09) If we’re trying to leapfrog into that existence while we’re still in human form, we’ve bypassed the whole reason we chose this journey and most of the stuff we judge in our journey, like our inability to grow our businesses where you know maybe you’re on your third marriage, or you know you’re struggling in parenthood or friendship is something that you haven’t mastered, you know, whatever it is. Consider for a moment that that was a challenge your soul uniquely chose to get to a place, walking that dark night of a soul where either you’ve then mastered a lesson that you chose to master this time around, or you’re getting to a place where you can teach it to others. Because I can tell you when I work with my private clients and I give them the homework assignment of taking time off of doing things that really care for them.
(18:20) I can hold their hand and do it boldly and look them in the eye and not pretend like it’s easy. Not pretend that taking a vacation should be a no brainer. I know the fear and sometimes terror that letting go can bring up in someone. I’m not confused about that, and because I walk the journey, I walked, I can now hold someone else’s hand firmly as they take the journey from overworking in over-giving to creating a business that is successful with a life that successful built on their terms. I can do that. I can get people through their glass ceilings that have been created based on building their life around what they know they’re good at as opposed to where their soul is calling them. All of those things I’ve done before and had I not faced down my own demons and walk through those places that were messy and confusing, then I couldn’t share that journey with another person.
(19:35) And I think the reason I’m speaking about that with particular intensity right now as I see, um, some spiritual teachers out there teaching the dysfunctional fairy tale, and I know that it’s, it’s not done to be hurtful. I know that they’re not attempting to hurt. It’s that there’s this way to market things where you just take people directly to the promised land to where they want to be in and say, do this, and then you’ll have this, and that’s a very typical marketing process. It’s how you get people to buy stuff. And like I said, it’s impossible to tell the whole messy hero’s journey in an introduction or even a sales page. But I think it’s time for people who claimed to be on a spiritual path, especially those of us who are coaches, coaches or teachers or writers that we really get honest about.
(20:34) You know, what actually got us to where we are? Because if you’re not honest about it, and then I’d say for you, wherever you are on your journey, if you’re trying to leapfrog over the hard parts or you’re not facing what really scares you and then sharing that openly with your people, if you are a teacher or coach or a writer, then you’re missing the most important part of the journey. The awesome thing about all of that is if you leapfrog over the hard parts or you attempt to leapfrog over the hard parts, you never get true freedom. But when you walk through the fire of your fear, it will never be able to burn you again. Like it doesn’t have the power to scare you any further. Once you’ve walked through it, first of all, walking through it, you don’t actually get burned.
(21:32) You just are always thinking it’s just around the corner. But once you get to the other side of that fire, you look back, and I was like, there’s no fire there. That was no illusion, and then you are free from it forever, forever. So there’s a really big value to doing it. I was reading a book Magdalen Rising, and it’s a, uh, it’s a fable based on an imagined journey that Mary Magdalen took. Mary Magdalene is eight a figure in the Bible, one that’s been probably portrayed in a way that isn’t accurate. So there’s a lot of fable and fiction Magdalen fiction out there that recreates what her life really was about because although the Bible portrays her as a prostitute saved by Jesus, most people who have studied historical writing, I shouldn’t say most people, but a lot of people in the study of the divine feminine have found that she was likely more of a partner.
(22:40) To Jesus, in terms of a friend and, and of equal footing. But as a woman, she just couldn’t take a leadership role the way that some of the men could. But in any case, in this particular book, um, Magdalen is this young girl being raised by these witches in Ireland and there’s this final, witch that’s, that’s there to help her through her dark night of the soul and helps her into the darkness and she says to her, I’m not going to tell you to not be afraid. That wouldn’t be fair to you. You will be afraid. But what I can tell you if you walk straight into that fear, you will find everything that you’ve been looking for, and it just hit me so hard. I thought that was so powerful. And so I want to leave that with you here, that walk into your fear. Walk Straight into it because it’s not real, but you get close up an in-person with it.
(23:48) . You won’t see it for the illusion it is, and it is inside. And then through that fear that your true freedom resides, and that’s what I want for you. And I know that’s what you want for yourself. And I know that’s what the divine wants for all of us. And so that’s my wish for you.
Have a fantastic day.
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.
Thanks for being here and reading my message. I want you to stay connected with me so that I can share all future communications with you.
Please enter your name and email below to join my community.
Success! Thank you for joining. You'll receive a confirmation in a while.