Why Pushing Harder Is Costing You: Pushing vs. Surrender in Midlife Business
GLORIA GRACE RAND: Namaste. You work hard, you put in long hours, and you do all the right things and yet your growth feels stalled. Why is that? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today because, you know, the reason why all of that effort is actually counterproductive. Pushing is really creating some internal resistance to growth.
And I am going to encourage you today to surrender. Now, I don’t mean wave the white flag, give up, say, oh, you know, forget it. No, no, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the first pillar.
We’re actually going to delve into two pillars today. But the first pillar of my love method is letting go. And what I’m going to encourage you to do is, in this surrender is to let go of the need to control, especially the how you’re doing things, because that is what’s going to allow you to scale the what your business.
I’m trying to figure out the best way to say this. That’s why that pause.
The Hidden Cost of Hustle: Energetic Burnout and Blocked Intuition
When you are in business, and especially if you are a solopreneur, there is this tendency to work hard, you know, to work hard to do everything yourself, to put in the long hours and just keep, keep pushing, pushing, pushing to get things done and to grow your business. And of course, when you first launch a business, yeah, you do need to do a lot of that. But eventually though, there comes a point where all of that pushing is, becomes really stressful, both internally, externally. It’s. You are acting from a place of, where you’re in this state of hyper vigilance.
And there’s an energetic cost to that because it’s, it’s blocking, it winds up blocking your intuition, which really is your most powerful strategic asset. And all of that pushing winds up stifling your growth. It’s, it caps your revenues. It also stops you from perhaps coming to the realization maybe that this business, business isn’t even serving your soul anymore and it might be time to do something different. But when you’re pushing, pushing, pushing and, and just doing, doing, doing, that’s what I mean by pushing, you know, putting in long hours, putting in, you know, really working hard and doing like a lot of everything yourself, you’re not giving yourself the time to pause and breathe and think, but not so much from your head, but think from your heart and allow yourself to really feel into do I really still love this business?
And if I love this business, how can I find a way to serve my business that isn’t going to come at the expense of My mental, physical, spiritual health.
So I talked about recently and with the last solo episode, I talked about bottlenecks in your business that, that serve to keep you small. And, and this, what we’re talking about here today is really a very good example of the strategic bottleneck.
Worker Bee vs. CEO: Breaking the Business Bottleneck
Because when you are doing, doing, doing in your business instead of being, it means you are really serving as the, the worker. You’re the worker bee. You are the employee of your business instead of being the CEO, the architect, the strategic thinker of your business, the high level person who is thinking high level. And really you’re not giving yourself that space to.
Come up with creative ways to grow the business. When you’re in the weeds, being in the weeds is, and I know sometimes it can really feel like you’re being productive because you’re like, because you can check off like, oh, well, you know, I got like five social media posts written and I’ve got, you know, I created my net, my, my autoresponder and I’ve got that, you know, I’ve been coming up with, I just did a new lead magnet and you know, and all these different tasks.
Without the CEO mindset, all of that stuff eventually just becomes stuff. It’s just things that keep you moving, but you’re really on a treadmill as opposed to being out in the world and actually walking down a trail and getting somewhere. But you’re just on this, you know, or a hamster wheel is another good way to think of it too, where you’re just, you’re just going, going, going, but you’re not getting anywhere. And I know you are a heart centered person because you’re listening to this podcast, you are watching us on the wonderful new realitytv.com and you want to be able to provide a service. You want to be able to really improve the lives of other people.
Why Women Entrepreneurs Give So Much of Themselves
And no matter what way that is, you know, however your business serves, whether it’s, you know, you are a service based business or you are product, I’m sure that you started the business because you wanted to make an impact in the world. You wanted to help people.
And that’s a noble thing. You know, it really is. It’s a noble thing. I think, I think a lot of people, definitely a lot of women go into business because of that. Because we, I would say, I don’t want to generalize and say all women, but I would say a vast majority of women are hardwired to be nurturers, to be givers, to want to support people in the best way we know how.
Setting Boundaries and Reclaiming Time in Your Business
And you can get lost in the business, when you’re not focused on the big picture, when you’re just too stuck in getting stuff done. Getting stuff done instead of being able to give yourself the grace, whether that’s through hiring other people or, or still, even if you are still a solopreneur, just setting boundaries for yourself and saying, I’m gonna only gonna work these hours. I’m only gonna work five days a week, maybe once a month, I’ll work a Saturday or something like that, just to catch up on a few things. But again, two hours maybe, you know, but set boundaries for yourself. I’m not gonna take phone calls, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put the phone on mute like I do when I’m recording my podcast and, and not take any calls during my productive time.
That is not only productive in doing, but it’s productive in being, thinking, pondering, daydreaming, giving yourself time to look out the window and imagine in a perfect world, what would I like my business to look like? How would it function? How many people would be working for me? Would they be working? Would I be working in an office?
Am I still working from home? Do I have, am I outsourcing? How many people are on my team? What am I doing to promote my business? Is it strictly an online business?
The Power of the Pause: Reconnecting to Your Purpose
You know, all of these questions, when you’re day to day working, You can get so lost in that that you aren’t taking the time to give yourself an opportunity to ask these questions. And so when you’re working, it’s exhausting. You know, it can really be exhausting mentally and physically and, and it’s very, it’s, it’s limiting. But when instead you’re able to let go and give yourself the power of the pause that allows you to realign to your purpose, realign to the why of your reason for starting the business in the first place.
It allows you to again connect with your higher self and, and really take a good look at. Is this business serving me? And if so, how can it serve me better as well as serve my clients better? And my, and the clients I haven’t even, that haven’t even invested in me yet. But those future clients, how can it best serve them?
Or, or if it’s not serving me, then what else could I do instead?
Journaling Your Way to Clarity: Designing Your Ideal Business Day
So giving yourself a time, whether it’s one hour a week, whether it’s one hour a day, giving yourself time to take a break and, and just sit, maybe do some doodling or journaling, of just again, you know, writing down and saying, you know, if money and time were no object, what, what, what do I want to be doing with my day? How do I see my day? You know, what is my ideal day like in this business? Because, and you know, and I’m not the first person to say this, I don’t claim to be, but you know, you have to have a target in order to know where to go. You know, if you’re just, if you don’t have any kind of target at all, you, you don’t know what to aim for.
So if you have an idea, you know, give yourself that, that time to be able to think, okay, what do I want my business to look like? What do I want my day to look like? What is an ideal week or an ideal day look like?
Because then you can reverse engineer it and start figuring out, okay, how do I get here? How do I get to that point? And the only way to get to that point is to give yourself time to think about it. And then you can, of course, not only giving yourself time, but it could be also, then reaching out to other people, other tools. It could be brainstorming with AI tools, possibly.
Why You Need a Mentor or Coach to See Your Blind Spots
But even better is finding yourself someone else to talk to, whether that is a mentor. Or maybe you could be part of a, maybe you’re part of a mastermind group and you can talk to the other members of the mastermind. Maybe it’s you, maybe you have a coach and talk to them, bounce some ideas off of them. Because when you are just in a vacuum, then it doesn’t, you don’t have that opportunity to see whether something really is viable or not. You know, you can have the best of intentions, but it’s still good to get somebody else’s opinion on things.
Because a lot of times we don’t, we, we get, we can get blind spots and we don’t see things that an outsider could see. And it takes being able to speak and describe what you’re doing to someone else. And ideally it’s someone who’s either been there before or, or, or just, or maybe doesn’t. But they might still pick up on something maybe that you say or that you describe. And they can say, did you hear yourself?
This, this is what I heard you say. And then you can be like, oh, it could be, it could be very enlightening. I know I’ve had that experience before in working with a coach where, where she said, did you, do you notice what you just said there? And she, you know, repeated it back to Me. And I was like, oh, no, I didn’t know.
I didn’t know I said that at all. It was just, you know, I was just speaking was just coming out without me really thinking about it. Which, it’s really a good idea to think before you speak, which is why you hear me pause oftentimes on this podcast, because I want to give myself time to really think. I mean, I have notes, don’t get me wrong. But I also like to be able to give myself time to think and maybe come up with some examples.
For instance, that in my preparation for the episode, hadn’t occurred to me, but once I get into the groove of speaking to you, then things pop up, but they don’t pop up if I just keep talking, talking, talking without pausing.
Lessons From 15 Years in Business: The Power of the Pause in Public Speaking
And. And a pause was. Was. And I’ll just share this. I. I highly recommend, if you do any public speaking in your business, to work with speaking coach.
To work with a speaking coach or multiple speaking coaches. I have worked with different speaking coaches in the.
Wow, 15 years. Holy moly. I just realized that it’s been 15 years since I started my own business. Over 15 now, because that was back in 2009. So in that time, I realized that actually doing presentations and talking to people is a good way to promote my services.
Working With a Speaking Coach: AmondaRose Igoe’s Advice
So I hired a coach. And the very first speaking coach I hired was a wonderful woman named AmondaRose Igoe. And it’s Amonda with an O, not an A. I’ll put the link to her website in in the show notes today, because she’s a wonderful, wonderful lady. Wonderful woman. She’s a lady and a woman and a wonderful coach.
And she emphasized that giving yourself time when you are speaking to pause, it does a couple things. Number one, it makes your audience kind of lean in and, you know, keeps them on their toes, so they’re waiting for you to say something else. And it gives you time to think so that you are not umming and ahhing your way through the conversation, which I admit I’m still guilty of. Occasionally. You will hear me sometimes on the podcast.
I will try sometimes to edit those out, but I don’t always. Forgive me, but that’s what pauses are good for, because they give you a chance to think so that you can speak a sentence or phrase without adding any extraneous syllables, I guess, because it’s. Is not really a word. It’s a sound. So.
Back to the Point: The Real Cost of Pushing Too Hard
Okay, where was I?
I got on a tangent there for a little bit. All right, okay. So. So we talked about that. This pushing there there’s an energetic cost to it as well as a practical cost to it.
As I. As I mentioned that if you’re the one always constantly working. I didn’t make this point. If you’re the one constantly working in your business and putting in long hours and working hard, When you do that, that takes away from hours that you could be actually generating revenue in your business. Especially if you are, let’s say, a service provider.
In particular, whether you are a coach or a therapist or counselor, consultant, if you’re doing all of the nitty gritty things, like a lot of the marketing tasks or the customer service or client. Well, I’m going to not say client fulfillment in this sense, but the things that allow client fulfillment to take place, let’s say client onboarding, setting up systems and processes for that, those are tasks that can be outsourced fairly inexpensively. And when you do that, then the time it would take you to do all of those tasks is now taken off of your shoulders and now you can be actually working with clients and generating revenue, or it can then also give you the more free time to think about ways that you could generate extra revenue.
A Midlife Entrepreneur’s Guide to Practicing Surrender: Two Simple Exercises
So let’s.
I want to do something right now. Yeah. Okay. I want to encourage you right now to practice what I preach. That’s what I wanted to say.
And I’m also going to pause one quick second and take a drink of water. My throat is getting dry.
Okay. So let’s practice surrendering. And what I would encourage you to do is.
Well, I’m gonna. Actually, I’m going to give you two different practices. Well, Yes, I know I’m. I’m like giving you too much. Too much homework here.
But let’s, let’s just. Okay, first off, I want you to get into the habit of pausing first off. And then I’m going to give you. So this is. This is.
This is. This is a homework assignment, but in two parts. So the first part is to practice pausing. And I. I know I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but I’m going to mention it again because we need to hear stuff lots of times, often. So I have a wonderful app on my phone that’s called the Triple Flame app.
Exercise One: Building the Pause Habit With the Triple Flame App
There’s probably others out there as well. But what it does is it allows me to set up reminders during the day to pause. And it ha. It’ll. It’ll do it like every three hours and.
Or you can set it for different times, but right now I have it set to go off every three hours and It’ll give me a little here, actually, I’m going to see. And this is what, this is what, this is what it looks like for those of you who are watching this. It says, and, and I’ve been bad because I’ve ignored both of these this morning. So I’m not even practicing what I preach. I promise I’ll do better.
But they’ll have little things like it’s time for a, it says it’s time for a pause and then they’ll have a little saying. So it says the one at 9 o’ clock this morning said inactivity is filled with magic. Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to talk to you about. And here I’m not even practicing my own stuff. So we’re going to take a little mini pause.
Now normally what I would do is if I hit this and it brings up thing and it says to start pause and it’ll, it gives you pause length of 3 minutes, 5 minutes or 10 minutes. So what I’m going to do is we’re going to do, going to do a 10 second pause. And I’m, and I’m noting how long it takes here, but I think this is going to be good for, for both of us right now, you and me on this podcast together, we’re gonna, we’re gonna pause and I’m, we’re going to. It says learn to love life through your hands, but I think also learn to love life through the pause. So that’s what we’re going to do.
Try It With Me: A Live 10-Second Pause
And then I’ll tell you the second part of this. So let’s hear. I’m going to hit start, start pause. And we are going to pause right now and wait till it gets up to zero there. Okay, now we are pausing.
10 second pause right now.
Okay, that was a little more than a 10 second pause. I think we went 15 seconds there because I forgot it plays music too.
How was that? Was that awkward? Listening to a podcast and not hearing anything for a few seconds? And I’m not going to cut this down because I could trim that pause down in the editing, but I’m not going to. And like I said, I knew it was longer than 10 seconds.
And I’ve decided tough because you and I both, I, I’ve been, I was ignoring my pauses today. I wasn’t taking a break and I should have. Naughty girl. Okay, the second part of that is to. Now we’re going to make this a little bit more practical.
Exercise Two: The 10-Minute Practice for Your Most Aligned Move
So the next time you face a business challenge, actually maybe even A personal challenge as well as, well, the next time you are challenged by something, doesn’t even have to be in the business. I want to ask you, invite you. That’s a better way of saying, I’m going to invite you to pause for 10 minutes. Especially if it is, well, let’s say if it is something in your business that doesn’t need your. It’s a challenge that doesn’t need your immediate action.
But it’s something that has come up that requires you to think about how can I solve this problem? So I want you to take 10 minutes and set a timer if you need to. And while you’re doing that, ask yourself, what is the most aligned move I can take right now instead of the most urgent one? Now, they may be the same. That’s absolutely in the realm of possibility that they could be the same.
But give yourself time first to think about it. Maybe, maybe even spend the first five minutes just thinking, thinking it over. And then, then start journaling. And it might be where you just ask, just write on a piece of paper, trying to think, here, I’ve got a pen. And just say, okay, what is the most aligned move I could take now?
What is the most aligned move I can take now? And then maybe just again, just like pause for a little bit and then write it again. Because I guarantee you that you do that eventually something’s going to come up, you’re gonna. An idea is going to spring forth. But the only way those ideas will spring forth is if you give yourself grace and time for your higher self to, to work.
The Neuroscience of Pausing: Why Slowing Down Helps You Think Clearly
And, and it’s, and it’s not even. You know, I speak a lot of the spiritual side, higher self. But I think, I’m pretty sure there’s also a scientific thing about this too, because again, when we react to something right away, we are reacting from that reptilian part of our brain. But instead, when you pause and you breathe, that’s another good thing. Take a deep breath and let it out.
Now, it allows your prefrontal cortex to work more effectively because you’ve given your brain some oxygen and space to come up with an answer.
Inside the L.O.V.E. Method: Letting Go and Opening to Receive
And I mentioned right at the top that this was part of this surrender. And letting go is what I teach in my Love method. So, so love is an acronym. So. So l said is letting go and letting God.
And, and I believe we are all part of God. So it’s letting your higher self, that connection to source, to spirit, to the universe, come through. But then it’s also. Now is the O is Opening your heart to receive. So now it’s about opening your heart to receive ideas from your higher self to then be able to receive new levels of abundance.
Because as you start releasing and letting go of the need to control and do everything, it naturally is going to open yourself up to new ideas of ways to make money or, or just which could be hiring someone to do some of the work so you are able to do more actual client work.
A Light Language Transmission for Releasing Energetic Blocks
Okay, one more drink of water here.
Okay. I want to do now is to really help this. As I say I, you know, there’s a practical side of this, but there’s also a spiritual side of this. And I want to help you right now with the energetic side to, to allow you to let go of perhaps any energetic blocks that are keeping you in this control mode instead of allowing you to allow to be able to open up to new ways of doing things.
So I want to share with you right now I some a light language transmission. And this is an opportunity for you to receive a message that is for your higher self, that’s for your heart. It’s not something that you necessarily, when you hear me speak it or sing it or both. It’s not necessarily something that you’re going to understand with your logical left brain, but it’s more intended for the right brain, that intuitive side of yourself. So if it is safe for you to close your eyes right now, I’m going to encourage you to do that and set the intention that you will be able to release, release whatever possible block there is that is leading you to be controlling and, and, and to focusing in on that sort of masculine go, go, go mentality, hustle mentality and, and really allow instead for you to open yourself up to new aligned ideas, opportunities and just give yourself that opportunity.
So I am going to set that intention for you all as well. So as I said, if it’s safe, you might want to close your eyes so you’re, you can just let your ears perceive whatever is going to come through and just let it speak to your heart.
Take a deep breath and let it out too, like I just did, I think is wonderful as well. So we can kind of not kind of. Let’s get settled. Let’s get settled and grounded.
How Did That Land? Reflecting After the Transmission
Okay, How did that land for you?
Felt good for me. So I’m, I’m intending that it felt good for you as well. That’s certainly, that’s certainly my intentions and it’s why I love doing this. It’s why I love, why I love speaking to you, number one. And also why I love sharing light language with you as well.
So I hope today that you have really learned and, and perhaps, perhaps it’s awakened you to a, a little bit of where you might be pushing in your business. And I realized I didn’t even, I didn’t even really share some examples of that. But I think it’s, I think we kind of, kind of. I don’t like it when I minimize what I’m saying. So I trust that in sharing things like you’re doing all of the marketing or you’re doing just too many tasks or just frankly spending too many hours on your business or in your business, I should say.
Yeah, in your business as opposed to on it at high level where you can look down and see how things are running. So yeah, rather than being the worker bee inside of it doing everything. So my intention is that you don’t need necessarily more strategies per se. What you need is an aligned container. And as it just so happens, I, I may have something for you that.
Introducing the Life on Purpose Accelerator: A 30-Day Container for Midlife Women
Well, no, I have something for you. See, again, I want to change my words. I have something for you that may be what you’re looking for. May, may not. But it is something that I have created and in am launching right now.
It is something that I call the Life on Purpose accelerator. And we are, we are going to be starting September 1st. And I am looking for some wonderful women who want to move from that push mentality to purpose, to focus more on where do I want to go at this stage of my life. Because it may be often, and I didn’t mention this specifically today, but my audience, I assume that you are part of this audience is that you are likely over 50 like I am and that you are in midlife. And that stuff happens in midlife.
You know, you become an empty nester. You, maybe you’re in a long term relationship that isn’t working anymore and, or I should say you’ve maybe lost someone that you loved a lot and that could be your significant other or it could be another family member or a really good friend. You know, maybe you had a really, maybe you’ve had a best friend that you’ve had since high school or even longer. And, and for, you know, and now you’ve lost them for, for whatever reason. It could be moving or where they passed away or something and it’s left you a bit adrift and you’re not sure what to do now.
And as a result the business is stuck. And maybe you’ve been in this hyper vigilant. I’m going to do everything and just kind of keep going, keep going, keep going and make this work. When instead this would be a good time for you to step back and spend 30 days with me for the month of September, looking in, looking inward and seeing what is going on with me, what is going on with the business. And at the end of that time you gain some clarity as to how you can move forward with, you know, by scaling and really letting go of that day to day struggle and, and focusing more on the bigger picture or going in a different direction altogether, maybe, maybe even retiring and letting it go and just enjoying some much needed free time.
So I encourage you to go. I’ll have the link to that program in the show notes and you can check it out and see if it’s right for you. I will tell you it is. It’s a beta program. So I’m looking for people who want to play with me and give me some good feedback and let me know what worked and maybe what didn’t work so hot and could be tweaked for the next time around.
And you. Well, yeah, I hope you’ll, hope you’ll consider it so because I would love to really get, I want to create this really safe container and, and support, support you in the best way I can. So I think, I think we’re going to wrap it up for today. So I hope that you will.
Closing Thoughts: The Courage It Takes to Let Go and Live on Purpose
I want you to remember that letting go, surrendering, it’s, it’s a really courageous thing for a leader, a woman in your position, or a man for that matter too. It’s, it’s really a courageous thing to do. And because it takes much more courage to actually trust the process, give yourself the power of the pause than it does to just grind out another task. So keep that in mind as you go forward today and in this next week until, until I’m back here again. And, and also if, if you found this episode helpful, I really would love for you to share it with someone else that you think might benefit from it and that would be amazing.
So until next time, I thank you for being here, number one. And number two, I encourage you to go out and really just live boldly and on purpose.
