18. When My Life Fell Apart, Habits Helped Me Rebuild
One of the intentions for the clarifying collaborator agreements was also to dis-entangle my essence from Clifton's, as Faces of the Future was a collaboration of the 2 of us.
One of the collaborations we did was with a quantum tech inventor, healer, facilitator. He was helping to facilitate a process of dis-entanglement for us, using his magnet tech. Around the time of the Spring eclipse I used this magnet tech and did a sacred plant ceremony too.
What happened next was an unfortunate series of events. It started with our cat running away. And I had spiraled into being a grieving cat mom. I could not regulate, I could not be present. I was emotionally flooded.
My identity as an operator in my business had weakened as I could not focus on client acquisition nor even client continuity for those who were working with us. And one by one our clients completed their programs with us and dropped off. I had a crisis of State where I could no longer be present for my business, and barely for my relationship with Clifton.
Our cat, Mica, played a pivotal role in my conscious awakening journey and during the darkest, loneliest hours of that journey, it felt like she was the only friend I had.
For 2 months, I searched our community, posting flyers, talking to neighbors, organizing search parties with friends, calling out her name, setting up cameras outside to track if she'd come by, searching rescues and shelters, lost and found pet Facebook groups and even hiring animal communicators to get clarity about where to look and peace of mind to know I am not wasting my time in this. It was this moment that made me see how much my identity was entangled in her and being a cat mom too. Not just entangled with Clifton.
I was going through an identity crises, especially without having clients to work with regularly and daily outputs around Service, which is a Key component for sanity and forward progress and conviction in your business.
The biggest lesson I learned through all of this is that I'd built a business that was completely dependent on my capacity to show up, and when life hit, everything stopped because I could no longer show up.
Prior to this, we'd seen remarkable growth in our business, but as quickly as it came, it just as quickly collapsed without the necessary infrastructure when our "States" could not hold the note. There was a lack of resilience built into our business model.
Clifton was holding space for me going through my process and kept busy building the master map of the ecosystem, figuring how to gamify our work and tokenize the ecosystem. I started to show up for some of these conversations with one of our collaborators. It helped to keep me going.
My mom and stepdad called me to Florida to spend some time with them and my grandma to help me reset my state.
I took an animal communication class to learn how to do my own animal communication. It got expensive hiring them and I wanted to learn the skillset for myself. I made my meditations focused on connecting with and finding Mica.
Part of me felt ashamed that I could not energetically connect with her and guide her home or guide myself to her. I also learned through this course about the free will of animals, I had previously given too much emphasis to the God-Self within all of us, to create our realities and was frustrated I couldn't create the outcome I wanted in this case.
I learned to appreciate the All-Self here as well and was deeply humbled by it. This perspective acknowledges that there is a free will choice pets and animals have and that may be to not return home and to go explore something else instead as part of their soul contract or mission with you or themselves, and to surrender into the higher order of these things.
Clifton and I went through a challenging moment in our relationship too. We had hired a relationship, family constellation coach then, which was a hard decision because at this point we had seen $0 in income for the last couple of months. We did some work to clear our blocks around money and lineage and re-connect as a couple without getting overly entangled.
We wanted to get a new pet together and considered getting a dog next, but were not allowed by our landlords. I was not ready to get a new cat.
One day I opened up a local Facebook group and saw a post about free kitten therapy a neighbor was hosting, no obligation to adopt, just come hang out with the kittens and neighbors. Clifton and I went.
Clifton and I bonded with several of the kittens, one of them almost ran out with us. She also nibbled my toes and climbed up my arm. I liked her energy, she was spunky. And there was a quiet, cuddly one in the corner with a loud purr that Clifton was drawn to.
It was only 2 months since Mica ran away and I felt it was too soon to get new kittens, I did not feel ready. It was also another added expense and more responsibility, especially with young kittens. And I was processing feelings of shame, guilt, grief, fear and abandonment about Mica running away and what that says about me as a cat mom.
But we left the event and I could not stop thinking about the kittens. We came back a couple of days later and brought 2 of them home for a trial run. I was hesitant but Clifton fully embraced them, and after about 2 weeks I did too and accepted the fact that we just officially adopted 2 new kittens together. We named them after the energy we felt from them — Athena, a wise warrior Greek goddess energy, and Serafina, a sweet angelic, love bug energy. It was such a blessing to have new energy and unconditional love in the house again.
Having new kittens and the coaching definitely helped me recoup.
What also saved me and helped me spiral upward from here was finally accepting the importance of habits. I'd seen what kind of downward spiral I slipped into quickly when I broke from my day-to-day habits in the business. It was the lowest lows I'd felt in 4 years, since I really dove into my conscious awakening journey. It felt like another mini dark night of the soul.
Getting back into my habits of meditation, going to the gym, doing my joy generating activities like walking and going to the beach and learning about something I was passionate about again helped me reset.
This time it wasn't learning about something quantum, healing work oriented, or the inner workings of the financial system, it was learning about habits and the science of behavior change. Very grounded. Very practical. I picked up the books Atomic Habits by James Clear and The ONE Thing by Keller Papasan and got to work.
And I'd remembered what stood out from clients who were successful in our previous programs and those who were not, and if I could attribute it to one thing, it would be their foundational habits they already had, and their execution of the new practices we gave them.
Clifton and I took the summer to re-work and pivot what we offer. And uncomfortable as it was, we had to get back at bat with launching a new program. It felt like hitting the reset button as we started doing market research again. Taking interviews and building a new incubator program for solo business owners or those looking to step into offering their Beingness Based Business as a Service (business as a natural byproduct of who you are). We filled the program by doing outreach and a couple of posts on social media.
This program planted seeds of the foundation we know call State -> Self -> Service. And how appropriate because I was rebuilding myself from the ground up of State again and re-anchoring in my habits.
We called it the Self Made Incubator. For those who follow the self-made path for success and entrepreneurship. This was a pivot from working with companies and teams launching big projects who wanted to raise money, and from working with established successful bootstrapped business owners looking for that edge and quantum leap in their performance.
What our new clients really needed was what I really needed at the time too, which was daily habits, nervous system regulation, and developing skillsets and discipline around Sales and Marketing, as they were stronger in product creation, client delivery. What a mirror for us it was.
I had to rebuild my confidence around selling and being able to deliver transformation once again. I used to feel comfortable selling multi-thousand/month 2:1 programs, but after turning off the sales pipeline, I had to get used to selling group programs <$1k/month.
We also came to the realization that we wanted to have all of our course materials and replays and toolkits in our own platform, designated container. Previously with our 2:1 work, the wisdom existed in 2:1 private chats and although we had some templates, workbooks and meditations pre-recorded, we were not building assets with our framework or community growth.
We launched a Mighty Networks platform, and it felt like it was calling all of our energy, power and awareness back to us. Having all of our client and group chats, replays and course assets we were building under one roof felt like you can see evidence and growth of what we were building.
We delivered the SMI class live in group format, with 1 mindset call and 1 implementation call/week and bi-weekly masterclasses on the topics of sales, marketing, identity upgrades, product building, etc. following our framework of S.T.O.M.P.
At the same time, we also created an evergreen fundamentals course we called the Total Life of Joy Initiator, our mini-course focused on State. And began offering it + weekly free live guided meditations to the free part of the community we were building.
I felt deep sense of purpose again and desire to be of Service. I was also greatly stretching my comfort zone in doing so.
As part of the macro ecosystem vision we were building, we knew that part of our ecosystem would be built through scholarships funded by our alumns and people in alignment with the vision. But, like I've said before, at the end of the day it all comes down to sales and marketing, and fundraising and taking calls with potential donors is another part of that.
As part of our SMI program, Clifton and I did market research interviews about what would get people to donate to a foundation. And as we were doing this, we got a strong message to join a Sales Accelerator program to figure out how to fundraise. It helped hone our sales skills further and build more confidence in sales for everything we offered! And I began to understand, appreciate and love marketing and social media content creation too through this program.
From there, I started studying and implementing everything Sales and Marketing related. And when it was time to launch our next cohort of SMI, we switched back to 2:1 delivery. We began working with solo business owners and wellness practitioners who worked with clients 1:1 and wanted support translating that to the online world and those who wanted a steady foundation and structure in their finances as they scaled.
Things were on the upswing, but the year's challenges weren't over yet. Clifton and I had both exhausted our credit and our business's credit during this challenging year. And I had a humbling moment where I had to ask my mom and grandma for a loan from the money they had set aside for me.
Of course they were concerned that I had gotten behind on my bills and couldn't meet my living expenses. They gave it as a gift, but it came with a lot of speculation and scrutiny and live intervention conversations about what I had been doing all these years and with Clifton and still hadn't figured out how business works well enough to support myself.
It was a challenging conversation because it came from the backlog of the past and was a lagging indicator of how I'd been investing my time, energy and resources up until this point, and it was not a reflection of what I'd been working on all year — that reality just hadn't caught up yet financially. I knew I wasn't out of troubled waters yet, and there would be clean up to do, but I was on the path.
For the first time ever, Clifton and I set quarterly and yearly financial goals for the following year and started tracking KPIs for sales and marketing.
And I started posting social media content more consistently, but it was not about Sales or Marketing. It was about habits and behavior change.
Because you cannot scale without first becoming stable, and stability is built through habits and systems, not inspiration.
I rebuilt my business by becoming someone who could execute consistently again.
