Grow With Soul - Episode 141 - A New Name - The Evolution of my Work Podcast Series

27 May

And now we emerge blinking into the new era. We have, over the last two episodes, talked about how Simple & Season started and grew into a business, and then the messy middle of deconstruction where it became less and less like a business. And that leads me to now, where I have a lot of pieces of things and am about to put them into a new shape.

What I talk about in this episode:

My relationship with control
The freedom in saying what I actually do
What my business model looks like now

Read the episode transcript:

A theme of this period already is, and is going to continue to be, control. I have discovered I have some issues where control meets value meets action. I spent a long time in a relationship where in order to feel safe I had to control every scenario to ensure that the emotional temperature remained constant, to make sure that no one had reason to be upset or get angry. I also had to control the way this all looked to the outside world so everyone would think everything was fine. Things are only safe, things are only happy, things only work if I am controlling them.

And that includes my work. As much as I have spent all these years longing for an appointment-free business, I also believed that the only way I could be valuable to a customer was via 121. I had the story that that was what people really wanted and needed and so that was what I had to do - but I had no evidence of that. The truth was, I believed that 121 was where I was most valuable because it was where I could have the most control. When you write a course or a book, you have to let people take what you’ve written and trust them to make what they need with it. You cannot, like you can with 121, micro-manage every part of their experience, keep a very close eye to make sure they’re getting capital-V Value.

It is a huge process of unlearning, this piece about control. When I was making Mapping I kept thinking “maybe this should be a group programme with lots of calls instead”; whenever I’m planning anything it’s like my brain is shaking me shouting “just offer a Zoom call, you have to offer a Zoom call!”. For somebody who has been writing and talking about getting rid of those should do’s and have to’s for years, I’ve been living with this big one right next to me, for years. “I have to do 121, it’s what people need”. But who says? It’s not what I, with my customer hat on, need - I rarely feel like I need a 121 with someone, but I often feel I want to read a book about something or work through a process by myself.

I have to do “proper” launch content, I have to be strategic, I have to be organised, I have to be in control. The only thing with these have to’s is that they’ve never actually worked. All they’ve ever done is sucked the vibrancy out of whatever I’m making, or usually, they mean that I don’t get around to doing the launch or the strategy or the content because I find it so joyless. Now I am beginning to lean into: what if I am a chaotic person and that’s how I produce things? What if I don’t do the things I “have to”? What if I make the content that feels edgy and exciting to me, that I want to make sure everybody reads - would that not actually be better launch content? What if what is required is not what I thought I had to do, but something completely different?

The new name

I used to be very euphemistic about what I did for a living. Unless you were basically someone who listened to this podcast, I would be very vague when people asked “what do you do?”. Hairdressers and doctors and acquaintances of friends would get something like “I work in marketing”, “I do social media” or even “I’m a teacher” - all kind-of, but not exactly, true. I couldn’t be bothered to try to explain, and justify, what I was. In February I went to the dentist and I said that I taught business online. Maybe being upside down in a chair and having someone looming over my mouth didn’t help, but it felt viscerally uncomfortable to say that, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. He kept asking questions about it, probably to put me at ease, but I bristled and clenched and absolutely hated talking about it. And I think that’s because that is so not my work anymore, that the misalignment caused a physical revulsion.

Lately I have found that I am not being euphemistic anymore. I went to a new hairdresser, I went on a first date, I went to a cafe with a chatty owner and I told them all the same thing: I am a writer. This, of course, opens up a whole load of more uncomfortable questions: what do you write and isn’t that hard to make money? But although the questions are uncomfortable it’s also kind of enlivening to say it. As much as I previously thought that being euphemistic was protecting my work from justification, it also kept it pushed underneath the surface. Saying “I’m a writer” feels more freeing because I have to spend less effort hiding. And the questions become less uncomfortable with practice - I write things on the internet and people buy them. That is, quite literally, what I do.

So that is the new name (sorry, slightly clickbaity episode title in case you thought there was a BIG rebrand incoming!). I am not a coach, not a teacher, not a marketer: I am a writer. Sometimes I write things that are practical and provide guidance, sometimes I write things that are explorative and provide revelation, sometimes I write things that are creative. But it all stems from this: I am a writer. Maybe this doesn’t sound important, but it’s changed everything.

You see, when I say I am a writer, it makes the pivot I have been trying to make for years finish its rotation and slot into place. When I can define myself as one thing, the other things fade away.

The reason I was always pulling myself from the brink of giving up 121, the reason I was always taking on just a few more clients was because I had the scope to. That was the real reason. Of course I was doing it because I was fearful, because I was controlling, because I need the money, because it felt like too much of a risk not to. But the reason all those things managed to override me was because I always could do it. There was nothing, other than my say-so, that meant I couldn’t do it. Now, because I am a writer, it is easier to say “I don’t do 121” because that’s not writing. I took the 121 offerings off my website. I don’t do it anymore, period.

Defining my work as writing also meant that the swirling not-sure-ness began to turn into real things, the raggedy string I was holding onto began to reel itself in. I had a few ideas for names of things, a few concepts of things and they began to put themselves together into matching pairs in my brain. Over the course of one weekend I went from not knowing what the shape of my work was going to be for the coming year, to having a clear as day business model. And that was because, when I leaned into being a writer who writes things that people buy on the internet, rather than a person who controls the outcomes for people, the ideas were free to flow in and be just what they needed to be. They were allowed to exist in their magic without the capital-V Value and the capital-R Results.

This is what this business model now looks like in my head.

Right at the entry level is my new free offering, The First Step. Before you do anything else, before you pack a bag or map a route or book a place to go, you have to decide that you have a journey to make. This is an easy first step (pun sort of intended) towards a life worth living - a mini podcast, ten minutes that you can put on while you make a cup of tea, all about the signs of wanting a change and the first steps to take to do so. There’s also a follow up optional mini workbook.

Then, at the first paid tier, are the Kits, Planning and Purpose - I also have another idea to build them up into a trio but that might need to wait until next year. Joining the Kits are the courses; there is already Do Your Thing and later in the year I’m going to put together Make More Time. These are the first tier of the business model, my more practical writings and projects, and the ones that are at a more introductory level and price point.

For those who want something that is expansive yet guided, a container to make a change but one with no pressure, there is Mapping. Mapping is what you would call my signature self-help course, I certainly feel it’s my best work to date. I like to imagine the Mappers printing off an essay to read one rainy afternoon, or downloading the audio to listen to as they bake; I like to imagine them pinning their map worksheets to the wall and getting an injection of confidence with each excursion. And although I am not there to control every aspect, I trust them to take what they need and map their beautiful life.

And finally, there is The Cabin. This is a new thing! The Cabin is for those who know what they want, but just aren’t doing it. For those who want to disappear to a cabin in the woods, into a space where they can just be, a space where they can practise and plan for the life they want.

The Cabin is a digital location that is all your own, a supported self-help programme to take the life you want from theory to reality via monthly essays, activities and Q&As and 121 support. It is a place for you to escape to for a few hours a month and focus on yourself. It is quiet and it is yours. In each room are books for you to read and notebooks in which to scribble, and every month a delivery of words and ideas will arrive. The Cabin is cocoon to support and nurture you while you learn to make the cabin of your life.

The cocoon lasts nine months. Inside The Cabin you will find rooms of resources and every month there will be a new delivery around our spine of monthly themes - an essay and audio, a workbook, a ritual and activities. For support there is a monthly Q&A and you also get 3 one hour 121 text sessions with me. Our monthly themes include Desire, Possibility, Devotion, Loosening, Sourcing and Flow - you can find the full list at simpleandseason.com/thecabin. By the end my greatest desire is for you to look around and think “oh look - I’m doing it”. The Cabin will be available to pre-order next month, and there will be limited spaces.

And of course, as a writer, I write books. Or, at the moment, the first book. It was around this time last year I had an idea for a title - I thought it would be a lead magnet, and then I thought no, it’s more than that, it might be a course, and then the more and more I thought about it I realised: this is my book. I hadn’t done any work on it before, because I wasn’t calling myself a writer then, but I thought about it a lot and over those months it formed itself into a shape until I couldn’t not start putting it down, it was pushing itself against the surface of me and dribbling out. I had the very macabre but galvanising thought that if I died in six months time, if I got knocked down by a bus in a few weeks, then the worst thing about it would be to have not written that book. The fear of regret pushed me to start, but I still danced around it because it wasn’t “proper” work - that is, until I decided I was a writer. Because what else does a writer do? After I allowed myself to start, it came in a flood. There was one memorable night where the jotting down of a few ideas became 3000 words, and the following day there came 7000 more. As I’m typing now, I’m about halfway through this memoir-in-essays of coming back to life. As you’re listening I should have already submitted the proposal.

Over these last three episodes I think I covered most of the questions that were submitted, but there are two that I haven’t that I’m going to answer now as I thought they were interesting.

The first was asking, how I navigate the intersection of interests/ability/skill and income. I feel like it might be pretty obvious from what I’ve described that that is not something to which I have paid any attention. I can see the venn diagram we’re all supposed to do now, I’m pretty sure I’ve tried to fill one in in the past, but you know what? If I tried to go by that venn diagram then I wouldn’t do anything because I would think they didn’t intersect enough. Because they don’t really, the rings barely touch. What the venn diagram doesn’t take into account is magic - the magic of the space outside the rings. The magic of what happens when we don’t do the safe thing you’re supposed to, but create the thing we’re excited to. I know, from all the things I’ve tried, that magic is the only thing that works.

The second question was, have you lost followers/conversion in the changes and how have you handled that if so? In the summer of 2020 I wrote my first book proposal that didn’t go anywhere but that’s fine. I’ve been copying and pasting some of the sections from it that still apply into my new book proposal, and one of those sections was about platform and stats and all that kind of thing. I was shocked to see that just under two years ago I had 27k followers on Instagram; I now have 21k. So, yes, I have lost followers and I have handled it by not really noticing?! Maybe that sounds flippant, I did notice that over time numbers had gone down and I had honestly forgotten that they had ever been that high. And I suppose that the reason I hadn’t noticed is that my email list hasn’t gone down, podcast listenership hasn’t gone down, Stories views and engagement hasn’t gone down - and while income has fluctuated I’d say that’s more thanks to the chaos I described in the last episode that it is losing 6000 Instagram followers. This is, in fact, another thing with being a writer now - my work doesn’t live on Instagram, and it doesn’t live or die by it. Instagram is a nice-to-have now, but it’s not making any difference, good or bad. So I’m going to carry on not really noticing those numbers.

Kayte Ferris