My Mostly Unconscious Cycle

One of the many things I was deathly afraid of when I started this journey 8 years ago was money. I was scared of my bills and debt. I was scared of taxes. I was scared of not making money in my business. I was scared of being homeless and starving. I was just plain scared.

At the same time, having a full time job did not create more stability. It did not allow me to keep my bills paid. It did not allow me to take care of my kids properly. It helped in some ways, but didn't help in the ways I really needed it to. A job was not the answer either.

That fear affected the choices that I was making in my business from very early on. I've talked at length about the money cycle I've been stuck in over the years because I share every time I get new clarity, which used to happen a lot.

I haven't been talking about it lately because it hasn't been coming up. I healed the old wound a while back, which is why I wasn't talking about it anymore. But I wasn't aware yet that I was caught back in the cycle. I had put myself there unintentionally. I did that when I made the choice to start offering private coaching and classes again towards the end of 2022. That was when I re-entered the cycle one more time.

Why was that choice part of the cycle?

I need to back up to answer this question fully. When I first started writing again, my goal was to be a full-time writer. My fear of money or lack of money made me decide that I needed to offer something else to earn an income until my writing was successfully supporting me - hence the classes, coaching sessions, and so on. I have held myself in this space since I made that decision, I think it was 3 or 4 years ago. It became an unconscious repetitive cycle of behavior that I hadn't yet corrected.

I healed all the wounds around it a while back. I don't have any of that fear anymore. I'm not bothered by money at this stage. I dealt with all that stuff, but I never fixed the behavior. Guess what that leads to? You get stuck in the pain. So guess what happened? I got stuck in the pain because I didn't correct my own behavior. Silly me!

Here's how this cycle goes. I would take down my private coaching and classes every so often, but I wouldn't free myself up to just write. Because I would get scared of the money I'd end up putting them back up within a couple of weeks. I've been around this block a few times. Are you tired of it yet?

Every time I tried to put some of my writing behind a paywall, I would get in my head about the structure that it needed to have if it was going to be there. It had to be topical and scheduled and in a blog format or a book and so on. I had a list of rules to follow because it had to look like what other people were doing. I couldn't just write freely and have that be good enough. Why would that work? Who does that?

What I really wanted to do was just set up a Patreon, put in some tiers to give people choices in terms of how much monetary commitment they wanted to make, and then write freely similar to what I do on my social media feed. If my blogs and my social media posts had a baby, this is it what it would be. It's just me writing about all those concepts that I talk about freely in a semi-structured format that happens to be paid for so it doesn't get shared elsewhere. I've wanted to do that since the beginning and I couldn't even after I healed the wound because my behavior was still stuck in the pain and I hadn't fixed that yet.

Some of you may remember I had a version of this on Ko-Fi for a while, but I was in my head about it and I wouldn't write freely so it didn't work. The other part of that is that I wasn't completely on message yet either, but that's another story. My own lack of freedom in my head stopped me from making that work for myself. If I had simply allowed myself to write freely, it probably would have been fine.

The other struggle I had, which I did correct when I put up the private coaching again last year, was the thing I had about keeping things around for more than a week. I had to get more stable in my offers and actually stick to things. So I stuck to a bunch of things that were part of an unconscious cycle for a few months. Go me! But, at least I fixed the wound right? hahaha

So now, fast forward to today - I have 2 blogs that I use consistently. I have this one which is what I call Random Thoughts. It's mostly still me talking about how the lessons show up in my life and how I manage those when they happen. I've retained my student card even though I teach these days. I play on both sides of that desk all the time and this blog is a reflection of my life as a student.

Then I have Uncovering Your Reality. That is my weekly scheduled blog where I share some of my "wisdom" around some topic that's come up at the time. It goes out every Tuesday and it offers the option to sign up via email so that they come into your inbox.

I post on social media all the dang time, usually that's paired with some writing in the background. I also have my free Facebook group where I talk about fear and managing it; that was one of the first things that I learned to do on my journey. I love talking about fear now. If I hadn't gotten over my fears, I hate to think where I'd be right now though. Not here, that's for sure!

Now I'm introducing Patreon. Like I said, this is going to be a cross between my social media feed and my Uncovering Your Reality blog. It's not going to be so much me as a student, it's going to be more me offering my perspective. It'll be a little less "dear diary" and a little more "here's what I've learned". Much like my social media feed though, it'll be a daily thing. I'll be talking about whatever shows up around me and everything that gets posted in there will only be for paid members. There will be very little public content on Patreon. I did put a public post up but it's quite possible that it will be a very lonely post.

I do the things that I talk about so that even when I get stuck in pain or cycles like I've found myself in, I own it and I correct it. I write about it, I share it with you, and I fix the problem. So yes, I took down all the coaching, classes and even The Conscious Clarity Community and replaced them with a Patreon community. I see the cycle, I recognize my stuck behavior, and I free myself up to do what needs to be done to correct it.

I don't get caught in fear. I'm not afraid of much these days. But cycles are still a thing even without the fear because sometimes that old behavior just hangs out there and you don't really realize what you're doing until it smacks you in the face.

I found some pain this afternoon, otherwise known as a smack in the face, because it wasn't working. I didn't have clients. My business was hearing crickets. But I was getting some social media engagement. The posts weren't doing awful. I was gaining followers. I just wasn't making any money. The only reason I wasn't making money was because I was still trying to do the things I thought I needed to do instead of the things that I wanted to be doing. I cannot force myself into a box; it does not work, at all, ever. Period.

I want to just write and share. That's it. I don't want to do anything else. I get grumpy when I don't get enough time to just write like this. I need this space and time. Whether the writing is a book, a blog, a social media post, or something else entirely it matters not, I just need to write.

So I'm back to writing. You can come hang out with me but I'm no coach. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe that'll change in 5 years, maybe I'll start an advice column, but for now, I'm a writer. I need to allow myself the space to be a writer full-time, fully, all in, and that's what I'm doing.

I'll be over here reading my own writing out loud to myself because that's what I do when I write. It's a thing and it works for me.

Love to all.

Della