Ep 67: Slowing Down for New Results

In this episode, I'm going to be sharing some of the things I did to slow down and create new results. You ready? Let's do it.

Hello! You are listening to Love Your Life as a Performer podcast. I'm Kelli Youngman and I am The Life Coach for Performers. I help actors, singers, and dancers love themselves and their lives way more. So keep listening to learn how you can love your life. Both on and off the stage.

Hello, and welcome back to episode 67 of the Love Your Life as a Performer podcast. Wow. I am so excited to be speaking with you all in this way again. I was just looking back and I realized that my last podcast. Oh my God, what am I trying to say? The last podcast episode I recorded was at the beginning of December. And I remember at that time just feeling a little tired, a little burnt out and really I don't know. The podcast itself just felt not super delish, even though I was loving the episodes. I feel like the idea of creating more. I just didn't have it. And I gave myself permission to take a week off and a week led to two months.

Today, I woke up and I felt so naturally excited to record this for you and all of my creative juices are flowing and yeah, it just feels so fun. So thank you for Supporting me in taking time off and I do want to share a couple other things that I feel like happened in that time, and then I want to give you something juicy to think about.

But I think even just, you know, I think about this a lot for my clients. I lead by example, I go first. And a lot of what I do is helping my clients to commit to things and follow through, but also to honor themselves first and foremost. And so I feel like in this circumstance, even though my general commitment is to create a podcast every week for you guys, you know, in this moment, it was definitely like I needed to take a step back and I needed to slow down.

Remember being on the phone with one of my best friends and I was just talking and my mind was racing and I was having thoughts about money and thoughts about, you know, what was coming next and thoughts about this round of The Paradigm and thoughts about my business and everything was just so fast. And it was really uncomfortable because she said, you know, like Kelli, you know, she's also a badass coach, life coach, and she said, Kelli, I just want to offer like as a friend, but you know, as a coach, I want to tell you what I'm seeing and everything is just so fast and you've had a lot of auditions and you're doing this and that and it's just a lot of energy and I think, you know, she suggested I slow down and I remember being so resistant to that because I was thinking, well, this is the life that I want to be living. Like, I want to be doing all of these things. I love doing all of these things and like these things themselves are not creating energetic output that, you know, I'm unfamiliar with. Like, this is my life. Like, this is what I do. But in actuality. Right? The slowdown doesn't happen in our actions. It happens in our thoughts and in our being and in our stillness that we create inside of ourselves.

Right? And so I'm so grateful that I really sat with that and allowed myself to alleviate some of the pressure that I had been putting on myself. To be excellent to do all of these things, right? Like we all know what that feels like. So yeah, I feel like in December I was experiencing a little bit of lack and scarcity and uncertainty about The Paradigm, about whether I wanted to do another round, I had a couple of clients who had already decided they were going to renew and then I had some clients that decided they weren't going to do the next round and when it came around to January to start, you know, I enjoyed the holidays, but I could see that they weren't as... I don't know. Joyful?

Like, again, the moments themselves, the days themselves were very happy and I feel like my partner Terry and I did a lot of fun things that made it feel festive, but the season itself didn't feel like I don't know. It started feeling heavy because I was thinking about all the things I needed to still do and long story short, I expressed this on my Instagram a little bit, but you know, when it came down to it, I realized that just going from one round into the next, into the next of a group container with The Paradigm, it's six months, you know, I had witnessed other coaches do it, but I had never been in the experience myself. So going from round one of the Paradigm into round two was totally chill. Like I think I had a vacation in between. I went to Italy, came back. There was like a week or two where it lined up perfectly for me to have time off.

And in that conversation with my friend, I remember her telling me that she had two weeks off for the holidays. And being like so envious that she had thought about that and looking back, that was something I had done in my coaching business and in my practice before. But because of this group container being every six months, I had sort of created the structure of like, you know, it starts in January and it starts in July. And going into the third round, I didn't really give myself adequate time to rest and recover and to have enrollment planned out and, you know, completed well in advance.

And so, again, like all of these were indicators to me that I needed to slow down and I needed to revisit how I could create these systems and my programs in a way that's sustainable for me too, energetically. And you know, it's so interesting because even as I'm talking about it now, it's just not something I could have anticipated before doing it and I want to just say this for everyone, like I think sometimes we get afraid that we're going to burn out or we're afraid of this or afraid of that and so we don't go all the way in or we don't commit to doing the work or we don't, you know, want to make the decisions that are going to lead to the next thing. And so we kind of like slow down.

I've also had that experience. You know in this scenario, you can't try to problem solve for that ahead of time. I find that a lot of times we just have to have the experience ourselves to know firsthand what we need, right? Everyone's different whether you know, you're applying this and thinking about this episode and what I'm sharing through the lens of however it applies to your life, right?

And actually, I say this all the time to my clients, whether we're on group coaching calls or whether they're hearing something, like you will get so much value out of these episodes if you're always thinking, how does this apply to me? What can I get from this? How can I learn from this? How can I grow? Right? Rather than thinking like, oh, I don't have a business. Maybe you do, but depending on who it is, right? If you're thinking like, oh, that's not for me, right? You'll never find the value or the lesson and you'll go into what I call like flight attendant listening, right? And you'll kind of be like, Oh yeah, yeah, that's good. That's great. Whatever. Versus like when we're really listening with our full attention with pilot listening.

So anyways, yeah, I feel like, you know, when we're in the experience firsthand, whether it's as a performer, running a business, you know, stepping into a new role, You can't make those adjustments till you're there. And the only way to prepare for that is to really be so intimate with yourself and to trust yourself and to make decisions that support you all of the time.

And so something that I did in January was that when I realized I was so tired and that I wasn't feeling fully myself going into the next round of The Paradigm, I decided to postpone it for two weeks and that decision allowed me to have space and it just allowed me to feel like I had some rest. I went on my sister's bachelorette trip. She's getting married this month and it's so fun. My first sister, the first girl of our family to get married. So that's been really wonderful and fun to sit in and enjoy.

And ultimately, it was really interesting because even though I had made the decision to put off The Paradigm or postpone it two weeks, I noticed that at the end of the two weeks, I actually hadn't really moved the needle on enrollment. And it was so interesting. And this is. Like, I'm sharing this with you because truly our thoughts are always creating our results. And even though I had in that circumstance alleviated the pressure by similarly to the podcast by just simply pushing it back, not doing it, I hadn't actually worked on how I wanted to create the result of having, you know, 10 or eight people in the group.

And even though, you know, we've had amazing, amazing results in the container. Like if I'm just speaking on a personal level, like the first round, we had three, the second round, we had five. And in my head, I thought this would be the round that we'd have 10 amazing, amazing participants. And my brain hadn't actually looked at how I was going to create that result, right? So I think I had 2, when I decided to postpone and take a break and give myself a little bit more time to finish launch calls and you know, talk to people. And I ended up getting some coaching from a friend, a different friend, and she was talking to me about how she had a very similar circumstance in her business where she had one person enrolled for her group, but she wanted to have ten as well.

And she went from one to seven in a matter of days. And when she said this, It's so funny to me because this is the power of coaching, right? When she said this to me and similarly, my other friend, when she was like, you need to slow down, like our brains will always roll our eyes and be like, that's ridiculous. You don't know what you're talking about. Like my brain does it too, right? Like I've, I've worked on becoming very coachable so I can witness my brain wanting to resist and still consider, take in, listen, apply all of the things someone's saying and consider them and, you know, find where it might be true.

Right. Even though your brain will naturally want to like discredit something, especially if it bumps up against something that you believe or, you know, a way of being that you've had for a long time. It will feel like offensive or rude or I don't know, like confronting, like all of those things are pretty normal when you're receiving coaching, but when you start practicing and training your mind to receive it, that's where you can find cracks and pathways and, you know, openings to new possibilities and opportunities.

So when she said this to me, of course, my first thought was like I don't want to sell hard. I don't want to do this. I don't want to like convince people to join The Paradigm when I know it's like this life changing thing. And so I had to really sit with, well, what if it could be possible to help six more humans walk into the best season of their life? To totally change what they're believing is possible to make more money, for them to be happier, for them to find love. And I had to really get my brain back on board with the point of all of this, right?

It's not just for me, Kelli, to like, air quote, have a successful business. And for me to have a life that I love, because I already have those things, right? Like I've done the work to live a life that I love. And now the point of it is to share what I've learned and to pass on these tools that I've gained from investing in myself and doing the work, right?

So when I really came back to, you know, people might call it the why or the mission or the service of it all, right? And like the love and the connectiveness and like not the egoic, like, what am I going to get out of this? Like I'm tired. I don't want to do this. Like when I left that resistance space of also like a little bit of entitlement of like, I don't want to have to convince people. I don't want to have to sell, versus seeing that like, when we're going to do something new, our brains are going to resist it, like I was just talking about. And so why wouldn't I, as the coach who's on the other side of it, who knows what's waiting for everyone? Why wouldn't I be down to get in there with someone and show them why, you know, doing this is going to be easier than they think. And it's going to create more ease in the long run. Right.

Because again, it's very normal for human brains to do this. And so I just want to share that, like, I was willing to get resourceful and I created a scholarship rate for a couple of clients. I, you know, reached out to people that I thought might be interested. I reached out to past clients that I thought might be interested in joining us. And I tell you that in a matter of 24, maybe 36 hours, I went from having two people in the group to eight.

And that really came from the simplicity of entertaining, what if this is possible? Who would I need to become if I wanted to create this? What would I need to be willing to feel right? I had to be willing to feel aggressive, I had to be willing to feel uncomfortable if people said no, right? Or like be okay with people saying no, because some people did say like, yeah, no, now is not a good time, this, that, like other people had conflicts too. And the practice of this is knowing that it's safe to make the offer, even if it's a no, right? Even if it's a no, it's safe to say, Hey, I have this amazing thing. Do you want it?

And I say that for everyone, whether you're hosting voice lessons or, you know, teaching acting classes, whatever you're doing too, right? It's safe to get no's. And so when I signed up for all of that, magic was created. And I feel like, you know, something I was talking about with my friend too, was like just allowing it to be a little messy.

I like things to be of a high caliber. And I feel like if you're listening to this, you are that way too, because you're my people. It's like when you have this expectation to operate at like a high standard all of the time, sometimes we're unwilling to let things be a little messy or to be a little unorganized, or we think it's going to mean something about us or reflect on us because it's not executed exactly how you thought it would be, perfectly.

And if I had let that stop me, I would have said, well, it's too late. And you know, my two clients would have gotten great results just from doing the coaching. But now they get the energy of eight people coming together. Now they get to experience eight people going for it full out in one room and getting to witness and champion each other and cheer each other on. And that's really why I created the program in the first place, right?

And so all of these things to say is that when you are open to honoring yourself and also honoring your commitments. You get to play in what would need to happen, right? What if? What if, right? What if, and we go do the result that we want to create and we slow down and ask ourselves, What would need to happen, right?

And I'm really excited because I have a bunch of money mindset podcasts I want to do. I just have so many ideas and I just am like so thrilled to get them out to you now. But just notice where you might be stopping yourself and already thinking like, well, that's not possible. Well, that's not possible. Well, that's just not going to happen. And instead, who would you need to become? To run an amazing group and be on Broadway.

Because again, I think my brain was hesitating a little bit because one of my goals for this year is to open a new Broadway show and I don't know yet how or when that's going to happen, but I could see that my brain was still thinking, well, if there's too many people in this group, I might not be able to open a Broadway show. And that just could not be further from the truth, right?

So, all of this to say, honor yourself, honor what needs to be done, and then look at what you want to commit to and what you would need to do to create it. Who would you need to become? What would need to happen? What beliefs would you need to let go of? What beliefs would you need to create, right? And this is where you get to step back into Possibility Play. You can go back and listen to that episode and just give yourself the opportunity to have the thing you want and get resourceful and accurate about what would need to happen, right?

Again, if you had told me that I could go from two people in the group to eight in a matter of hours, days, I wouldn't have believed it was possible previously, until I saw someone else do it, right? The same thing with like the four minute mile. Once someone did it, then it became possible and everyone else started doing it. Right? So, keep that in mind. Take that with you this week. Honor yourself. Slow down. Be open to listening and receiving things that your brain wants to be resistant to because I promise, that's where all the magic is. Alright! That's what I got for you this week. A little recap. Some lessons sprinkled in. And I will meet you back here for another episode. Bye.

Hey, I want to invite you to get started because if this is blowing your mind, imagine the impact of when we actually work together. You get to love your life as an actor, singer or dancer, even including auditions. And if that sounds amazing, come join us inside of Momentum, you get lifetime access to the performer's plan, coaching, community, and more. And I will be supporting you the entire way. Go to kelliyoungmanwellness.com/momentum to join us now.