13. I Could Help People Change. I Couldn’t Change for Them.

It's Winter 2021 and Clifton and I have hit a great cadence of working with four 1:1 clients at this time. Each session starts with them getting into flow. The way you get into flow is by elevating their state: hydrating with hydrogen water, using our in home Wellness Studio — the vibration plate, followed by 20-45 minute session on the vibroacoustic therapy bed. We discovered that this really helps loosen old patterns and drop into a state of coherence pretty quickly.

In that receptive flow state, new insights, inspirations and downloads drop in. Our clients would typically receive those insights when they're on the vibe bed. After that we'd shift into our session room to unpack what they just received, but first drawing an oracle card with a message for the journey ahead or for the particular session.

Our build process looked like this: we'd built out all of our modules for each program on Miro, an infinite digital whiteboard. And after each session, Clifton and I debrief and make improvements to the journey from what we learned and applied it to our master template. Keeping it kaizen with small, iterative build, measure, learn cycles.

We build out a piece of the program, then gather insight from our client session. It would move them forward towards living what we call their Total Life of Joy, and it would be move us and our process forward. It became a blockchain, with insight added to the subsequent block in real time.

The transformations we were facilitating were incredible, like being able to do auditory channeling by the third session with us, and experiencing Kundalini awakening, tuning into their guidance, getting into alignment, activating certain unique intuitive gifts. Changing and purifying their diet and lifestyle to hold more prana, have more vitality to support the expansion into these new levels of alignment and clarity. We learned that in such a high fidelity, high coherence container, blindspots can easily be brought to the light. Many of which would take years to uncover and address in traditional therapy, coaching or solo reflection.

Where we went wrong is certain clients lived with us, and so we wore the client/coach, roommate, friends hats simultaneously. That is a lot of entanglement for a shared space. For me, that felt like there were no "off" hours. And I made myself available for anything type of discussion at any hour. That's a lot of responsibility, carrying and capacity invested from us. So it was not a scalable business model ultimately, and it was hard for me to fully turn "off" and relax.

Everyone in the house was doing their own spiritual practices too and going through their own healing journey, and because of close proximity with one another and entangling with each other during sessions, it seemed like when one person was going through something, everyone went through it. To be fair, the whole collective was going through it then too with the pandemic.

And speaking of pandemic, I got into a bad habit of binging conspiracy theory content late at night before bedtime, wishing the world would wake up to the lie of the plandemic. It sounded questionnable and was controversial back then, but 5 years later as I write this, here we are, much of it has turned out to be true.

It weighed heavy on me though, because it had me sever even more from the mainstream narrative. I was completely off all of social media too because I lost trust in big tech, and their shutting down certain narratives with "fact checking".

The house became a haven during the pandemic. Crazy as it was to live with people who are your clients and friends, and sometimes complete strangers; however co-working, co-living with other conscious entrepreneurs and creatives proved to be the best solution to social distancing during this time period. Especially with a house ethos we all agreed to and wrote together.

What I realized when I look back now is that with clients we worked with at that time, it was the same case as me a couple of years prior. If they went through the Foundry Fundamentals, but could not stabilize their new upgraded awareness and Self into an offering aka Service, it ended being a mismatch and cognitive dissonance for their current reality and job, so it would spiral into a crises of State (nervous system dysregulation) and continuous Self exploration — a perpetual cycle of upgrading without integrating the new insights into life changes, or forming the new habits. Ultimately it was too much of us carrying the vision on their behalf. Transformation only crystallizes with lasting behavior change.

For those who were extremely successful with our program, it was because of their grounding and anchoring into habits, their ability to follow through, and having a Service already that is a reflection of who they are in their upgraded identity. Which is why habits and consistency eventually became a huge part of our process.

I used to take that really personally and attach my validation of our work to the results we were able to get for people. When I would see them take less responsibility for their own results in their life and business, I would jump in and overdeliver. I would over-invest to get the result. It was a pattern within myself of externalizing validation if my internal belief conviction was lacking. Because I wanted the results to reflect the excellence that I knew was our process.

That's a hard lesson to learn as a coach, to not over guarantee the results someone can get through working with you and clarify that results vary based on their actions. To throw them the rope, give them the tools they need to succeed, to hold them lovingly accountable, and to not jump in the hole to rescue them when the temptation is there. To ignore the temptation to rescue that is part of how you were trauma wired, and instead hold the space lovingly for them to rise up.

However, that isn't beneficial long term because it doesn't create long term results, teaching them how to fish (some of them I'm not even sure if they wanted to know how to learn how to fish on their own). I realized that no level of proximity, coaching, or insight can replace someone’s willingness to take responsibility. And until I stopped carrying that for them, results could not stabilize.

So I learned the importance of having a tighter screening process to vet for readiness in how you select who gets to enter into your containers and have proximity to you. I was learning the same lesson both with the roommate vetting process and client vetting process at the same time. In both cases, as you grow and improve, your ideal avatar also evolves with you.

Ultimately, what this period built in me on the client delivery side was my ability to not rescue, my ability to screen clients and my ability to separate self-worth from outcomes.

Clifton and I both were really great at Client delivery and refining the product. And in our operations, project management, but when it came to doing sales or marketing, both of us were less than zealous at that time.

Clifton had experience with both from founding and scaling other companies in the past, but I was new to it and wanted to ensure I had a pathway to learn them to create a solid foundation for our growing business.

It was hard for me to receive mentorship from Clifton in this area. I hadn't seen any evidence of him doing either one of them, so I didn't trust in him at that time that he had what it takes. I knew he had done both before, but I underestimated and discounted his abilities prior because I wasn't seeing him use them now. I also knew he was recovering from a traumatic business "failure" where he went all in and had to let it go, so I wasn't sure how long it would take him to bounce back from that.

Whereas in the past I was overly trusting of his capabilities, ignoring his current capacity he was presenting with as he was going through a conscious awakening; I now overcorrected to only trusting what I saw him doing in the present moment and projected that if he's unable now, he never was able or won't be able to again int he future. That was one narrative.

Another narrative is I finally wanted to take ownership of making sure I had my own skillsets to increase our sales and improve our marketing, so I wasn't just relying on Clifton. Both narratives can be true at the same time.

So that summer I enrolled us in a coaching program. I went back and forth about if I made the decision from fear or courage. I learned that what matters more than the actual decision you make is the place, or level of consciousness, you are making it from. What you are believing to be true as you're taking the action.

Whereas I'd made many investments on the spiritual growth side of things and to develop my craft, this was the first time I joined a program to learn about sales and marketing. It was completely new and exciting for me. And also nerve-wracking.

At first it created disharmony between Clifton and I. What I saw later as I looked back is what it was doing was bringing up things between us that were not in alignment, where we were not on the same page, to bring them into coherence. It even combined our two programs into 1 program. We wouldn't understand the mechanics of how until many years later.