I’ve started my Instagram business page in 2019, after seeing that having this type of content was even a thing. I didn’t even see it as work back then, but I was a big fan of self-development content on Instagram since content shared in this form was more insightful than many books I have read.
Initially, my page was created because by being drawn to this content, I began sharing it on my personal page. Up until that point, like many people that are followed by friends, acquaintances, and random people tend to do, I was sharing those “look how good my life is” posts because that was what everyone else did. But I suddenly became more brave and I began sharing self-development stuff, too. What was interesting to me was that from all the people that were following me, based on what I was sharing, a new audience began resonating with my shares. Old friends or people that I’ve never met but were randomly following me were suddenly engaging with me simply because I was sharing insights that I resonated with, and that resonated with them, too.
This allowed me to see the law of attraction at play way before I understood what it meant – and it blew my mind to realize that I can call in different people based on the content I share. If the “look how good my life is” was coming from an inauthentic place and was attracting – obviously – more shallow interactions, these posts were stirring deeper conversations with people that I deeply resonated with. This made me realize that it makes sense to start a new page where to gather only my people, and so I did.
In the beginning, I played with it. I created cute quotes and re-shared insightful memes that I found interesting.
Soon enough, based on the unique insights I was sharing from my own healing journey, I began receiving invitations from people to help them transform their lives. What gave me the confidence to begin sharing my message was the simple realisation that I spent 5 years in therapy without resolution with my trauma, and that in just a few months of applying my own discoveries out of therapy, I healed more than in those five years. I had immense confidence coming from this simple thought “Therapy didn’t help me at all and I know there are people going through that. If my work will help them even 5% more, then I already win at this”. Soon enough, my niche kinda became “helping people who were not helped by traditional talk therapy”.
One thing led to another and my business took off fast. I soon quit my job to be able to fully be focused on what became a real business. And after quitting my job, I naturally had more space to be intentional about how this online business thing works because while my full-time jobs + work experience was in marketing + content writing, this was a whole different thing. Corporate marketing has nothing to do with marketing a self-development business where there are other principles involved.
As I say: “you can’t market therapy in the same way you market Coca-Cola.”
You can’t compare selling a soda with selling a program that is meant to transform someone’s life, because the readiness needed to drink a soda is quite different than the readiness to invest in a process that will take you out of your comfort zone, invite you to face your shadows, and lead you through a life-changing transformation. You simply can’t, because the needs and the readiness are massively different depending on what you sell.
In that first year of trying to figure this out, I was massively confused. I tried hiring business coaches for a minute but the moment they told me that “a good marketing strategy is to reach out to people directly and sell your service”, I’d run for the hills.
Because how on Earth can you force someone that doesn’t even show you the slightest interest and doesn’t even follow you into wanting to heal? That sounded so ridiculous, but the good thing about the non-sense advice I was receiving was that it allowed me to get really clear on what was wrong in the industry, and to speak about it. My message slowly evolved into being the voice for all the things that were not quite ethical and okay in this sometimes confusing industry I found myself in.
And while my heart was always committed to integrity and truth, I also took on many rules that with a lot of healing and self-discovery I came to understand that they weren’t serving me.
A lot of us – of you, too – still operate from them. And since they are more subtle and not so ridiculous as “you need to cold reach out to people to sell your work”, we barely question them.
As I have been gaining confidence in my truth and stepping into my zone of genius, I came to really take a step back from everything I’ve learned and to build a business model as if I have never learned anything from the coaching space in my life.
At first, this journey was terrifying because being part of this industry gave me a lot of conditioning, but it gave me a lot of comfort, too. It’s easier to feel safe and confident that you’ll be successful when you see other people succeeding by following the steps you are following. However, when you go on a path that your intuition is calling you towards yet it’s not one you see anyone else walking on, it can be quite scary.
I am writing this not only to share this story, but to help you know that if you’re here, you are so not alone.
A lot of us are in this clean slate phase now in our online businesses – we’ve built businesses based on the rules to success we’ve been handed, those ways became very misaligned, and we are now in the process of trailblazing our uniquely aligned ways in which we are actually meant to succeed.
I’ve been already doing this for the past two years and receiving a new wave of clarity regarding how my new business model is supposed to look like feels like opening gifts on my birthday every time – there is truly no deeper sense of liberation than the one coming from realizing that something feels hard because we hate doing it, and finding clarity over how it’s aligned to do it instead.
This is the process of building an alignment-based business – the process that I am whole-heartedly committed to following and to helping others achieve, too.
In this process, you can realize that one part (or more) of your business simply no longer work for you.
These parts can be:
Marketing related: for example, something none of us truly questioned before was this belief that you need to show up on social media daily in order to market your business. Well, a lot of us are misaligned with this rule now, and we are ready to build more impact and wealth by showing up less. I was lucky to know my truth from the beginning and to stay away from the toxic business coaching world, but not everyone was as lucky and there is so much deconditioning to do as a result of that for a lot of people now. When we work together in designing your aligned business model, we always look at all the rules you’ve internalised that simply are misaligned with the way in which you’re meant to succeed. Other rules can be related to the way you launch, to what you’ve learned you need to share in order to sell, to how often you need to post in order to sell. Most of these rules feel so horrible to me that it feels heavy to even write this now.
Related to your role as a healer: There is a huge problem in the coaching industry which is related to the insane codependency that happens behind closed doors. If you’ve operated in your self-development business from this codependency, it is no wonder that you’re now traumatised. Those dynamics are simply sickening (they can actually make us ill), unsustainable, and they are so traumatizing because they place the coach in the role of the parent, and then the client pays to feel entitled to be parented instead of being guided. This is the recipe for disaster, and it makes sense if you’re looking back at your client experiences and you’re like “What was that? I cannot do that anymore”. The way in which I support the clients that are healers and that have been traumatized by the effects of codependency in their client relationships is, of course, through healing codependency and teaching them how healthy coach-client dynamics look like (hint: not like that). When we heal from our codependency wounds, we access our zone of genius as a coach, and learn how to lead the dynamic with sovereignty and without being dragged into rescuing anyone. In doing this, the coaching experience feels genuinely so mutually nurturing and safe! (this may sound like an utopian reality for my fellow codependents but I promise, it’s possible).
Apart from these two big parts that you may be ready to decondition in your business, there can be other parts that ask you to be transformed, where you are meant to find your aligned way of doing them instead. To be honest, after working with clients who were in this phase themselves, there were so many aspects that they were called to decondition, so many hidden rules they’ve taken on, and so many of their traumas at play that it feels impossible to remember them all.
It was the same for me. So far, I’ve deconditioned how to market my work and the need to show up daily on social media, how to lead my work from my zone of genius, how to not be dragged into codependent dynamics, how to call in clients that don’t need parenting, how to call in abundance without self-betrayal, and so much more, alongside healing the very traumas that were making these rules feel appealing to my unconscious mind.
And because I cannot just sit and take time away from my business, I’ve video-journaled my chaotic process and shared it in a course that people confirmed was massively helpful. You know – when you feel like you’re going insane and you are alone – it kinda helps to see someone else navigating the very exact thing and articulating the horror of it all. This is what Metamorphosis is about: mindfultricks.teachable.com/p/metamorphosis. This has been a course where I shared my journey as I went through it and a new module will be shared when I will uncover clarity on a piece that I am actively working through right now.
I always thought that the evolution of my business will naturally be about me working less in a 1:1 manner, but this is the beauty of this self-discovery journey – it reveals what’s aligned! So I was pleasantly surprised that post-burnout, my capacity to work 1:1 increased, and I’ve enjoyed seeing my zone of genius in action. My zone of genius is to use my intuitive ability to seen the unseen and have your blind spots be revealed to me within minutes so that I can help you heal what keeps you misaligned, and gain clarity over what’s aligned. You can apply for my mentorship here: https://mindfultricks.typeform.com/to/WyUG7yyO
That’s it for now. Happy continued deconditioning, loves!