112: How to Build a Business and Life that Matches Your Energy

Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast, I’m your host Andrea Liebross.

Each week I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level are you ready? Let’s go!

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the middle of January. Let's talk about you. How are you? No, really, how are you? What are you feeling? Are you feeling back in the swing of things, back in the groove, back to normal? Have things settled down? So, speaking of down, it's the season of letdown. I believe there is some statistic that by January 21st, most people have quit on their New Year's resolutions, and they start to spiral down.

But I know you, if you're here listening, then you are likely a person who doesn't want to quit, even if you've entertained the idea for a few minutes. But what I find is that when entrepreneurs do quit, or slow down, it's oftentimes because of what is going on in their lives, in the background. It has nothing to do necessarily with something specific in their business. It has nothing to do with, let's say you made a goal to exercise four times a week, it has nothing to do with the exercise. It has something to do with other things that really probably aren't very related.

If you've been following along, you know that I have shifted my business to really, really focus on female entrepreneurs and serve them at every stage of their business. I just want to remind you that whether or not you are a one-woman show, you could call yourself a female entrepreneur or business owner with a few contractors or a small team, or whether or not you feel like you are a CEO with a big team having revenue in the millions, regardless of your stage in your business, I can serve you.

In January, I've opened the doors wide to all of my programs and I encourage you to explore coaching options. You can always head to the website to do that. You could also just head to andreaslinks.com to be linked to it. You don't have to spell anything. But I want to remind you that I serve you the whole way along your journey. Here's what we're going to talk about today. Regardless of the stage of your business, you are a human. Humans only have so much energy. Wouldn't it be great if we were the Energizer Bunny? But we're not. Our lives, my friends, just like our businesses, are complicated and can sometimes feel exhausting.

I wanted to talk with you about the relationship between building a business and building a life, maybe we need to switch that order, building a life and building a business, building a life while running a business and how our energy plays into all of that. Several months ago, I had this realization that this is my third business and this business is now, as of 2023, into its fifth calendar year. Can you believe it? Because I can't. Like I can't believe that I've created over 110 podcasts or I have served hundreds, probably up to well over 1000 women, I totally have. I can't believe that.

Most people in the podcast world, if we're talking that, most people quit at 10 after they record 10 podcasts, they're out. Most businesses fail within the first three years. I've beaten the odds on all of that. This longevity, if you want to call it that, is a gift that is denied to many. Or how about this, it’s a better way to think about this, people quit before they get there. Oftentimes, they quit because they're exhausted. They're exhausted mentally, most likely, and physically but mentally exhausted.

I remember when I first started, there were all these stats about how many people make it past their first year, how many people make it past their third year, and I didn't pay much attention to that. I also didn't pay much attention to the fact that people would say, “Oh, life coaches?” because at that point, I think I really felt like I was a life coach only. “Life coaches, they only make $30,000 a year.” Well, guess what? They have not met me. They've not met me and they probably haven't met either.

But nonetheless, five years, that's a long time. I have worked with thousands of people for as different as we all feel in many ways. I can assure you, we're not that different. There are some real basic truths that I think we all share. The more we tune into those and tell ourselves the truth about that, the better everybody's going to be for it. Specifically here in this entrepreneurial space, whether you're a coach, a lawyer, an educator, a designer, a mental health professional, a photographer, or a writer, I serve all of those types of people. Whatever it is, there's a lot of noise. There are a lot of you shoulds, which turn into I should. You should quickly pivot to I should.

“Oh, you know what you should do? You know what you should think?” “Oh, I was thinking about, you know what you should do, right?” There are a lot of you shoulds everywhere. Most of my clients drop into and resonate with wanting to know what's right. They can feel the intensity of when someone says you should. They didn't say you have to, it was you should. But we absorb a lot of energy from those shoulds. That energy is literally noise in our heads.

As much as we try to put on our noise-canceling headphones and block out all of the shoulds so that we don't absorb that energy, it is hard. It is hard. Sometimes when you're on the plane and you put on your noise-canceling headphones, you can still hear what that pilot is saying. When he comes over the loudspeaker or she comes over the speaker, you can hear what they're saying even though you have those noise-canceling headphones on.

We are constantly absorbing all the noise. I certainly have gone through phases in my life and in my business where it all just gets too loud. In fact, the other day, I was receiving some coaching of my own. I brought to the table, to my coach that I should be further along in my book. My coach said, “Should you?” I said, “Well, I'm behind in the timeline that the publisher has given me. Yes, I really should be further along.” She asked, “Could you just tell the publisher that instead of a June submission date, it's going to be a July submission date?” “Well, I could, it's a possibility.”

I want you to go with this idea of noise-canceling headphones in that example. What I really needed to do was to turn the volume down on the shoulds. It is rather staticky. Turn up the volume on the internal me. Think about this. You've got your noise-canceling headphones on, you're trying really hard. But when these shoulds come at you, which suck the energy out of you and can be very exhausting due to the internal dialogue that they create, I want you to think about turning down the volume on the shoulds and up the volume on your internal wisdom.

If you tend to be like what I'm describing, where all of a sudden, you hit these moments where the world is loud, I want you to imagine this. You're driving in your car, and you have one of your audio buttons programmed to a genre of music that you don't love. Maybe your kids program that button because they love that genre. For me personally, this would be probably heavy metal.

When you start to feel the weight of the shoulds and it starts to suck the energy out of you and you feel the internal noise rise, you feel exhausted, this is just like that genre of music that you don't love being turned up super loud. Your headphones are no longer working. Because this noise which creates exhaustion is penetrating your ears. I am sure after you've listened to someone rant for a while, you start to think and you might even verbalize, “I'm so exhausted listening to the same thing.”

Think about it. When your kids start chirping at you the same stuff, “You never let me do this. Why can't I do that? There's never anything great for dinner,” all of that starts to sound exhausting. This is the same thing. When you feel like you are behind, when you feel like you should be doing something, it's exhausting. The volume on this music that you don't love gets turned way up.

Now, here's what we do. What I want you to do is to turn the volume on loud on the station or genre of music that you love, the one that makes you dance, and at the same time brings you some peace. Classic rock tends to put me in a great mood and actually fuels me to move and do what I want to do. That happens to a lot of us entrepreneurs. You have a vision. You have ideas about what you want to create in the world and what you want, the very notion of you being an entrepreneur means that you're already someone who wants to be successful. I really, really do believe that.

I do believe that there are a lot of people who give up on themselves because of these shoulds, because the volume is so loud on them. But I do believe that every person that hangs a shingle out and says, “I'm going to do this thing in the world,” they do not do that and wants to fail. No one puts a shingle out and wants to fail. They do that because they want to be successful. It's just that for some people, there are different needs and different challenges that come along the way, and they may not actually fulfill that desire that they have to put value out there into the world.

If we can just agree that everybody who hangs out a shingle does want to thrive and does want to be successful, then we actually can see that when it is not happening, it's because of the noise and the exhaustion the noise is creating that get in the way. Here's the kicker, my friends, where we anchor wisdom has an impact, not just on our ability to achieve success, but the speed in which we do so, the energy it's going to take, and the exhaustion we experience, where we anchor wisdom. If we anchor wisdom in those shoulds, those people telling us that we should do this and should do that, which they all can be very well-intentioned, but it is my observation that where we anchor wisdom has an impact, not our intelligence, not our intellectual knowing, but wisdom.

People who anchor their wisdom internally move faster and achieve more. People who anchor their wisdom externally and listen to the shoulds from others get confused and it slows them down because we get filled with the “you shoulds.” In coaching, which is different than counseling and consulting, the essence of coaching is not to be telling you what you should do. The essence of coaching is to help you extract your own internal wisdom.

If I asked you the right questions, if I give you the right tools to put in your own toolbox, then you will be able to extract or excavate your own internal wisdom. I would say that I've experienced both wisdom internally and wisdom externally in my life as a businesswoman where I was clear as day, my wisdom was accurate, and I went all in, it paid off. Where I was clear, not when someone else told me how to be clear. But when I am clear, when my own internal wisdom is accurate, it always pays off.

Other times when I can't find that internal wisdom, and where did that wisdom go? Did it take a vacation? Where did it go? I'm lost when I can't find that internal wisdom. Because what do I do and what do we all do when we can't access our own internal wisdom? We go knocking on the doors of everybody else. Do you have it? Do you have it? What about you? Maybe you have it? Oh, you look good. We start to go into the shiny-object syndrome. This is when we download things off of Instagram. We roll on things on Instagram that catches our interest that necessarily aren't always good.

The world starts to get noisy, heavy, and exhausting. Since our businesses and lives don't come with instruction manuals full of diagrams of what things should look like and how to put it all together, we walk around to everybody else's manual and ask, “Oh can I do what you're doing? How did that work out? Were you successful?” But just because their manual looks better—and make sure you listen to the episode on manuals—and just because we all started from the same place, we have to put things together in the same way because everybody's manual is different.

We can have different manuals and still get the same results. We can have different instructions, they can be written in a different way, and we can still get the same results. There is no one way that you should be doing something. If you go looking for this stuff externally, those shoulds that you're going to find externally are going to be exhausting.

Now when we have all these shoulds, we do start to try to fit our lives into our business versus fitting our business into our lives. Here's a great analogy. We had the volume analogy with the noise-canceling headphones. Here's another one I want to share with you. It's a strainer analogy. I want you to picture your life as a strainer, and there are little holes, strainers where things seep through. Your life should be the foundation of things and your business should be able to fit into those little holes in the strainer. It is not the other way around.

Your business should not be the strainer and your life fit into those little holes. But when we go to that external should type of knowledge, that's what happens. The business starts to be the strainer and life starts to have to fit into it. That, my friends, is exhausting. But as we get more mature in our business ownership and more mature in our lives, what I'm also encountering and experiencing with so many of my clients who are creating revenue over a million dollars and have a team is that they are really over trying to fit their lives and their businesses because that's heavy, exhausting, and zaps all of your energy.

But the clients that I have that are on the newer side, that have not reached, maybe they haven't even reached $300,000 revenue in their business yet, they're still trying to fit their life into their business because they feel like there are so many things they should be doing. That's what we do. We do a lot of exploring about that inside of that you. But once we get into the Runway to Freedom mastermind, and beyond, it's a third category of people, which I don't talk about too much, but those are the ones that are creating a million dollars in revenue and above, they really have figured out that their life is the strainer and the business has to fit into it.

Think about this. For most people, it's find a partner, get married, make babies, start a business, and then it is this business that should make money. But all the while, while the business should be making money, you should be going on the field trip. You should be spending more time with your kids. You should have a better website. Very soon, you start to feel very reactionary, not proactive like when you were younger, when you were beginning your mission to find a partner, to get married, make babies, and start a business.

Back then, you were listening to yourself way more. When that all actually comes to fruition, you start to listen to everybody else about what to do in the business, about what to do with the kids. This starts to zap your energy and you stop listening to your internal voice who is begging you to slow down and use your energy in other ways. You are barely keeping up. That strainer which is your business is heavy. Your life can barely fit in the holes.

So many of my clients who I've worked with for a while who have achieved multimillion-dollar businesses, they had hit a place in their life where they were like, “Wait a minute, I'm not listening to me anymore. What do I want? What do I do? Who am I? What knowledge, internal wisdom do I have?” These bigger questions come up. This isn't just for women whose kids have left the house or never had kids, this is for any woman. This is for any woman, young kids, it doesn't matter.

When they monitor their energy exhaustion ratio, there's been a significant change in their life when they reflect on their energy exhaustion ratio, and they see that the exhaustion side of the ratio is heavier. They start listening to their internal voice. Listening to your internal voice can be very energizing. Listening to the shoulds on the outside can be very exhausting.

Big transformations are happening to people everywhere, my friends. There is a collective waking up, in many cases, for a lot of women. They need to be woken up because they are asleep since they're so exhausted. Listen, if you haven't woken up in the past year, you better start waking up. We have to create the lives we want. No more waiting. No more believing that other people will do it for you.

As exciting as that is, it's also quite terrifying. For many women who start a business, and you guys have heard me say this before, a lot of women I believe start a business because they're trying to heal some wound that they've experienced in their lifetime. They're trying to prove themselves. They're trying to establish value, worthiness, and independence. All of that is great. I don't think that's bad. It's just, let's tell the truth about it. That's what a lot of women are doing.

It's great news because all these women are out there making money, but they also can get so immersed in their business that they end up building a life around their business, which is exhausting. Their life becomes so impacted by the shoulds. “I should be contributing more. I should be successful faster.” We've accommodated the business when we do that by compromising our lives.

If we are on such a quest to prove ourselves, to prove our own worthiness, then we compromise things. I think a lot of women, I don't know what's going on, I don't know, but that's what they're doing. Instead of just saying, “Wait a minute, I have a truth that I'm going to find inside me. The answer is inside me,” people just are programmed to believe that it's outside of us and we're starting to realize, I think in the world collectively, that no one really knows.

I turned 50 last June and you could say on the back nine, so what is the life I want to live on my back nine and what is the business I want to build that's going to support that? Not “What kind of business am I going to build? What do I want to do? How do I want to build it?” There has to be an alignment and my life goes on top or before the business. It's the strainer. If I think about the business first, it becomes exhausting to live the life I want, to live that back nine.

I can build a business that supports the life I want to live on the back nine. I think wherever you are on your business trajectory, if you're more of an of I’ve got this kind of person who's working on that, or if you're working on creating your runway to freedom, or if you're beyond that, and you're in the million-dollar revenue range, you can make this decision, you can make the decision of what kind of life you want to live.

I do not think this is the gift of someone who already has a successful business and a lot of money. I actually think it's the opposite. I think a lot of people who achieve tremendous success and wealth get trapped in a business they hate because they didn't ask this question. They didn't ask, “How can I build a business that supports or aligns with the life I want? My life comes first. The business has to align with it.”

People get trapped in a business they don't love because it's not aligning with their life. If you're living a life right now that's precluding you in some way from investing as much as you want in your business, let's talk about that relationship a little bit. Let's talk about that. What kind of life do you want to live? And then let's build a business that works with it. But if you're not investing in yourself, then you can't even invest in the business.

Maybe you have young kids. Maybe you have someone you're taking care of. Maybe you don't have the resources. Whatever the reason, if you are not in a position to give yourself the energy and attention that you need, then there is no way that you're going to be in a position to give the business the energy and attention it needs. You're inadequately supporting both things.

How do we invert our relationship with a business that seems heavy and exhausting with our lives? That's the question. How do we work on our life so that we can work on our business? In 2020 and 2021, I went through some challenges with my parents and I had to be there for them. The emotion that I worked to have every time I thought about that situation, the emotion that I worked to try to create was gratitude because I had this beautiful business that was able to ebb and flow with the needs of my life.

I think if nothing is the gift of entrepreneurship, it is that. But we forget that and then we build ourselves into these businesses and it starts to feel like a job. If that's where you are, if you're on the opposite side of this, think about it. Where are you? Have you built a huge business that can't breathe without you? We need to change that. If you built a huge successful first without building a life, we need to change that.

You can change that but you have to do the work. You have to ask yourself, “What am I creating in the world? Who do I want to be? What do I want my life to look like? How many days do I want to work?” This is lifestyle design, my friends. We just did this in the mastermind. Where do you want to live? What do you want your days to feel like? Who do you want to spend your time with?” Be honest with yourself.

If you want to have a business and it’s great, but yet you want to take it to another level, you have to go back and refresh your memory and ask yourself “What do I want my life to look like in this next stage of our business?” You've got to look at all the facets of your life, your health, your relationships, your family, your time with yourself, your self-care, your day-to-day vibe, what do I want those to be on purpose? Because you can cultivate and create what you want, not just give the leftovers of your life to the world after you've spent all your energy on your business.

Really what this does is it begs the question ultimately, which is do you believe that having a business that integrates into your life, not a life that integrates into your business, do you feel like this is possible? Do you believe you can be the strainer? Do you believe that it's possible that you can cultivate a life first and then design a business that feeds it? Or do you have to design a business and then accommodate the business with your life? It's a question to answer.

Do you want to keep believing that you have to build a business that feeds your life? Or do you want to build a life that feeds your business? This all came up because there are a lot of people out there who are just listening to shoulds and thinking they should do something and it is exhausting. When they do that, they let the business take over.

I think whatever we go through some transition in our lives, in our space, and in our world, whenever we feel movement, the wisdom that we desperately need to seek is internal wisdom, is inside of you. Now sometimes we need help with that, looking for that internal wisdom. That's why I'm going to do an in-person retreat for my mastermind clients in March.

When I've been on retreats as a participant, I know you've heard me talk about a little bit, I find that it's an incredibly cathartic time for me. It's incredibly cathartic for all the other women who come. It's a way to ground into you, to become grounded to own your own knowledge. You're the best gift you have for yourself. It's not outside of you.

In the day-to-day that we live, it's easy to start believing that what's outside of you is best for you. It's easiest to start to believe that someone knows how to do your life better than you, what you should do. But I know that if you sit with yourself in the quiet of the morning or the evening or on a retreat, and you just let wisdom come, you know there's truth there. What if you just believed it was possible and you design the life and then you decide what kind of business will support that life? I want you to give it a shot.

If you're not there yet, if you don't know if this is possible, and it's a really hard concept for you to grasp, because I know that sometimes things feel impossible until they are possible, if you're still listening to people telling you what you should do and you feel exhausted, then I encourage you to join us this month inside Committed to Growth, which is my coaching program, where we really focus on business mindset, and this is what this is.

There's business and growth right in front of you. But you have to have the right mindset to absorb it. That's I've Got This, that's what we do in there. The doors are open all month long. Come grab a consult spot. You can do that by going to andreaslinks.com or andrealiebross.com/consult. The doors are open all month long.

But if you are in the land of possibility, and you don't feel exhausted necessarily by being confused, but you feel exhausted by your own success, and you've been listening to your own internal wisdom for a little bit, you might want to join us in Runway to Freedom and join us on our in-person retreat in March. Go to andreaslinks.com and set up a call. Let's do that. The doors are open all month long.

Even if you feel like you have mastered this and you are on your way to creating multiple millions of dollars, and you want to up your game, up your own internal wisdom, I have coaching options for you too. Reach out, go to andreaslinks.com, set up a call. I have coaching options and I love serving my clients on all three stops along this journey of entrepreneurship. Which is really what it is.

Remember entrepreneurship is just a journey in personal growth disguised as an entrepreneurial adventure. I love that quote. I want to help you along this journey. It is really an entrepreneurial adventure and it's fun. Let's chat, my friends. We've got a lot of exciting changes coming up here in Andrea Liebross Coaching and I don't want you to miss out. I want to make sure that you don't miss a beat. So head over to andreaslinks.com.

If you're not on my mailing list where you can receive all the news on how to level up your business and life and get all the updates on masterclasses that I'm creating and programs that I'm offering, sign up for that. Drop your name and email into the connect with us. Get the news link at andreaslinks.com. All right. No more shoulds because it's time, my friends, to level up right now. See you soon.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great but you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to Andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.