Grow With Soul: Episode 140 - The Messy Middle - The Evolution of my Work Podcast Series
This is part two in this series on the evolution of my work, and last time I told you about my motivations for starting out and the circumstances that pushed me into my first pivots. I left you just as 2020 was about to start, so shall we continue?
What I talk about in this episode:
The lessons in an unsuccessful launch
The struggle of a long breakup, and its effect on work
How I came to pivot the business
The difference between ‘a business’ and ‘my work’
Episode 139: In The Beginning - The Evolution of my Work Podcast Series
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Read the episode transcript:
This is part two in this series on the evolution of my work, and last time I told you about my motivations for starting out and the circumstances that pushed me into my first pivots. I left you just as 2020 was about to start, so shall we continue?
My big plan for 2020 was an offering called The Un-Mastermind, which was planned to be a mastermind, but nice. I say “planned”, but it wasn’t very planned. I had the concept, and, as it was a group programme, thought it would figure itself out along the way - that I would respond to what people needed rather than impose the curriculum. It was £5K a place, with ten places - the plan was that this would be my main income for the year. This was the most I had ever charged for something, but everything I had ever launched had sold, and given that I was no longer doing 121 client work I thought that it would be a fairly easy sell - all the people that would have wanted 121 would now funnel into this offering. I was complacent, and presumptuous.
There wasn’t even a real launch plan because I thought that amongst all the people on my email list, all the people on my Instagram, all the people who had ever had 121 with me, there would, for certain, be ten among them who would buy this. I thought I didn’t have to do much more than send an email and post a few Stories. This was not the case.
I had two enquiries about it; one who ended up going with a cheaper option, and one who decided not to go with any option at all. I had hoped that I would be so overrun with enquiries that I would have to run two groups of the mastermind, but it wasn’t appealing to anyone. I didn’t double down and put together a launch plan, I didn’t give it my best shot - instead, I gave up. I thought “nobody wants this” because people weren’t biting my hand off to spend £5K, and I simply removed it from my website. That was the first time something hadn’t sold for me.
I didn’t reflect on it at all, and actually, as I describe what I did with the Un-Mastermind it is uncomfortably resonant with my first launch of Mapping this year, which you may recognise if you listened to the Reflections on a Launch episode - perhaps if I had take the time to review what happened here I wouldn’t have repeated the same mistakes. But I wasn’t in a frame of mind to realistically reflect on it then, I don’t think - I don’t think I would have seen my own downfalls, only assumed that people didn’t want it. I didn’t have time to mope or panic or be upset about it - having just bought the house, I had no savings and I needed to come up with something to make money. I re-launched a course and started to work on a new programme and then, the world locked down.
Lockdown
After those first few days and weeks where none of us had a clue what was happening, after the UK self-employment support scheme was announced, I carried on with the programme I had been about to launch. It was three months, a lot cheaper than the Un-Mastermind, and it sold well. I remember sitting in the sunshine at the bottom of my garden creating the content. I was not entirely appointment-free during this period, but for most of that hot spring-summer of 2020 my memory is of this, of sitting in the sun creating content and feeling like I’d done it.
After the three month programme I had the idea for The Trail, a monthly membership programme with weekly content and felt very much that I’d hit on IT. This was something that would keep me appointment-free and where I’d spend most of my time creating. It launched that summer and was the best launch I’d ever had - it flowed because I was excited and I was creating infectious content around it, it seemed to just hit the sweet spot of my intention and enthusiasm, and a need in my audience.
I had “sorted out” my work with a long term offering that was working well, I had the dream house, there were vegetables growing in the raised bed, I was watering the garden each night with a glass of white wine. But what I could no longer ignore was how neglected, exploited and unhappy I was in my relationship - and how perhaps that had been the problem all along.
It took me months to build myself up to end it. During this time I got out of the habit of posting online, because what do you say when all you can think about is how you need to leave this man, save your life? I did leave him, at the beginning of September, but that was another ending that was only a beginning.
Being mid-pivot
I feel lucky to have had The Trail, a few one-to-one clients and the COVID grants to have got me financially through the year after the break up. I couldn’t work. And I don’t mean that in a way of “oh I just couldn’t face it” or that I didn’t really want to - my brain could not make ideas. I started 2021 intending to remake the business in the shape of the new life I wanted, but almost immediately circumstances overtook me. I moved out into an Airbnb while still paying all the expenses at the house where my ex was living, meaning for the first months of the year I was spending £6K a month on living expenses alone. Then, after moving back, there were months of trying to figure out whether I could keep the house on my own, and after deciding that I wouldn’t, selling the house. And after accepting an offer, there began months of believing I would be moving imminently, living week by week, solicitor call by solicitor call.
While I knew abstractly we are just one human and that stress in our life-life affects our work life, this year really smacked me in the face with it. I really wanted to work, was desperate for the release of it, for the feeling of building, of competence - not even for success at this point, just to feel like I had something. But I couldn’t. I tried really hard to have ideas, and then I stopped trying to have ideas so they could just flow into me but nothing came - all my brain was able to process was finding a house, or packing, or when to next call the solicitor, or coping with this loneliness. Despite wanting to, the fact that I couldn’t create began to get me down, to give up my posting habits and stop trying. There were times I thought that I might have actually lost it forever, that the idea generation part of my brain had broken down beyond repair.
It was like I spent this year in a constant state of mid-pivot. I still wanted to be appointment-free and I knew I wanted to move away from being a person who talked about marketing and business (more on this in a minute). They were the things I clung to, whilst also simultaneously clinging to the fact that they were the only things I had to keep myself afloat. I couldn’t ideate or vision what an alternative business would look like, what I could possibly do of value that wasn’t these things, and so I carried on talking about them while I was trying to think of ways to stop. I had started the pivot in my mind and in my intentions and desires, yet I couldn’t complete the move, was jammed mid-circle in no man’s land.
What I couldn’t talk about anymore
In June I wrote an email newsletter called “what I can’t talk about anymore” - I’ll put a link in the show notes. In it I talked about how I didn’t want to talk about marketing anymore, about how, although I could converse about it, I couldn’t write about it, how I had been holding onto it because I thought I should, because it was what people wanted from me. When I said I was going to be doing these episodes someone asked me why I thought I fell out of love with talking about marketing, and that’s been interesting to think about.
I remember Sasha once saying how she “felt the no” and that’s exactly what it was like. Imagine you’re on a date with someone and it’s going quite well and then they do something that is a deal breaker for you or gives you the ick and a shutter comes down in your body and you are just no longer mentally there. It wasn’t that marketing did something to give me the ick, but my body shuttered up and I was just done with it. I think at the time I definitely felt that I had nothing left to say about it, that I couldn’t get any ideas and that meant there was nothing left - whether that’s true or not I don’t know. Really I think it’s more that I was changing and evolving as a person and talking about marketing is what a previous version of me did, a version I no longer had access to. I just became much more interested in other things, wanted to talk about so much more, things that felt important and personal and that excited me. It wasn’t that myself and marketing had a falling out, I just expanded.
I had thought by the time I redesigned my website that I would know for sure exactly what my work was going to be, but I didn’t really. I had a blurry idea, was holding the raggedy end of a long string that went off into the distance where I couldn’t see what it was attached to but I was at least holding it. It was enough to be able to write some copy and swivel this podcast into being “work in life” rather than marketing and business. And then, I remember distinctly walking up to the steps to the gate in my old house, the thought arrived in my brain “oh, it’s Mapping”.
Mapping
I had had the name Mapping for a good two and half years but never really had the idea to go with it. I’d made starts on courses about strategy but nothing felt like it until that day on the steps when I realised all the nebulous thinking I’d been doing about fulfilment, and life and balance all made sense when they became Mapping. I didn’t start working on it right away because I had thought that I would try to sell some 121 to make money, but I was doing nothing to sell the new programme because obviously deep down I knew I didn’t really want to do it. At the end of the year I moved out of the house, landed in a new cottage and I felt it coming back - the ideas, the focus, the desire to create. And I made a start on Mapping.
I called this episode “the messy middle” because it is messy but more accurately I think it’s the messiest middle. As I said at the beginning of the last episode, the whole experience of running a business is 90% doggy paddling and 10% certainty. It’s all a messy middle, only this period was a bit more notable in its messiness. We want to be sure, to know, to get onto an island and stay there forever - I know I always do, I just want to know that THIS is IT. I spent so much of this period searching for The Thing that would stabilise me and my work, The Thing that I would do for evermore. But our work is not separate from our life when we are one human; the shifts and the earthquakes and the sunrises in our homes and relationships and selves ripple into our work. There is no such thing as the constant island, at least not for me.
Writing this I notice how much of the change is led by how I’m feeling. A question I’m asked, about lots of different things, is “how did you know?”. When I asked about questions for these episodes, I was asked about the motivations for each pivot and how I strategised it all out. But there was never what might seem like a “sensible” motivation (I am calling something like “I wanted to increase my income without increasing my hours” a sensible motivation here - something that is grounded in reason and straightforward rather than “I just felt so trapped”). And there certainly was never a strategy to the pivots. It was always a feeling that led the charge, an intangibility, a reaction of ick or excitement that was dragging me along rather than a logical decision.
Perhaps if I was leading a Fortune 500 company that would not be a good answer (but then again, maybe they could do with acting a little more out of feeling). But I am not. And while this is a business it’s not a capital-B Business. The biggest shift I think that happened over this period is that I went from being a business-owner to a person who creates stuff. I began to think less about “the business” and more about “my work” - the difference being, in my mind, that the business is an entity that holds the work whereas “my work” is what I produce as a human being. I realise as I’m typing that I have stopped talking as if I have a business altogether: I say that I am self-employed rather than I am a business-owner. As I moved away from marketing and into life, as I began to write more personally, this all became more about what I needed to create and impact on the world than it did about building a business.
Which leaves us on a good place to end until the third instalment of this series, and a visit from the Ghost Of Business Future.