273: Holly Worton ~ What Change Actually Looks Like

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today, I’m going to talk about recent changes in my business (as of this week!) and what that means for this podcast. I’m also going to go deeper into the details of what’s been going on behind the scenes so you can get a better idea of what transition looks like. I know that a lot of business owners go through changes and will of ten pivot the focus of their business, and I think it’s important to talk about what these changes often look like. They’re not always smooth and easy! I know I’ve been talking about changes since this time last year, but it hasn’t happened as planned, so I want to share the reality of what’s been going on.

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

What change actually looks like
The behind-the-scenes peek at what’s been going on for me
What’s in store for this podcast

Things I Discussed

Changes Are Afoot https://www.hollyworton.com/changes-are-afoot/
Cracking the Code to My Weight Loss https://www.hollyworton.com/cracking-the-code-to-my-weight-loss-keto-omad/
Business Beliefs https://www.hollyworton.com/mindset-books/
Alone on the South Downs Way https://www.hollyworton.com/walking-books/

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast, episode 273. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today, I am talking about changes. I recently, and when I say recently, this is Thursday that I am recording this and this all kind of started on Monday. So, I recently went through some major changes in my business. I recently made some major changes in my business and I wanted to talk about that. Also about this podcast and where this podcast is going.

So, it all started on Monday, when I sent out an email to my list. I have been really silent on my list for a long time and I have found it really, really, difficult to be consistent with sending out emails. I hate to say, when I have something to say, because it is not like I never have anything to say, but sometimes I will write something really heartfelt to my list and it gets a great response and it is really useful to people just sharing stuff that is going on for me. And I feel really good about those emails, but I have not been good about doing them consistently. And so, oftentimes, I will try to fill in the gaps with roundup emails of past podcast episodes and stuff that has been going on, and I don’t know how useful those are; so I just don’t feel drawn to do those. So, there are weeks of silence for my email list, and then on Monday I decided to just acknowledge the fact that I have been silent and give myself permission to not write for a while.

So, I sent out this email to my list saying: I know I have been silent, but I am consciously making the decision to just go silent for a while. And, this all kind of came about as a result of a session I had had on Monday morning with my friend Cara Wilde, she was facilitating the session. So we were working with her guides and doing some energy healing and that kind of thing and basically what came up is that I am not focussing on the number one thing that I have said that I was going to focus on this year. This year was all going to be about nature and getting outdoors and writing my books.

Writing

Now, I did release one of my walking books a couple of months ago and that was great. And I have been working on releasing a second edition of my very first Business Mindset book: Business Beliefs and that has been going well, I have expanded it to about 50,000 words which is a nice length for a non-fiction book. Just sent it to an editor, just got back the comments from the editor, but I have been really, not working on it. My heart is not in it. My head is in it, my head says: this is a great book, I can make it better, I am making it better. I wanted to release a new edition of the eBook, release a paperback for the first time and create a workbook for it. And, my head was really excited about that, because I know it would be useful to people, but my heart just wasn’t in it.

And I have had this sign on my desk, for months, since almost the beginning of the year, which says: #1 priority tree book. And I haven’t been treating the tree book as a number one priority. That was the third book this year that I was going to release, I originally planned to have it out in December, and I just haven’t been making progress on it at all, because I have been focussing on the Business Beliefs book, but yet I haven’t been focussing that much on it. So, it has been really frustrating to me, because I haven’t been making my writing a priority, which is what I wanted to do this year.

So, I sent out the email to my list and got an overwhelming number of responses from people, so many people wrote to me saying: good luck with your book, I hope to see you on the other side of this, hope everything is going well.

So many just great emails supporting me in this change. And the next day I felt the need to write a little bit more about it, so I wrote a blog post about it, talking about what was going on between Monday and Tuesday, and how this came about and some of the things that came about and some of the things that I do know, for sure, about this new focus and transition. So, I am going to be focussing more on my tree book, I am going to be focussing more on my nature work including my walks and other things. I made a bunch of changes to my website. I deleted a bunch of pages, including my ‘work with me’ page. I removed a lot of references to business mindset. I created a new ‘books’ page for my website that then links from there into my walking books and my mindset books. And that felt really good, it felt like a massive decluttering. I immediately blogged, I wrote this blogpost where I was talking about the changes and then I wrote another blogpost where I was talking about some lifestyle changes that I have made in terms of diet and losing weight. I am going to be blogging about a bunch of random stuff for a while, as I move through this transition and get clear on my path forward. But, writing is my number one priority for real this time.

Patreon

I am also going to be focussing on putting energy into my Patreon community which I am super excited about, I just doubled the size of the Patreon community this week. And I will be closing down my Facebook group and shifting my community to Patreon. And as I have mentioned before for the first ten people who join my Patreon, and we have still got four spots left as I record this, I will be giving everyone, no matter what price-point you sign up at, I will be giving everyone, the first ten people all of the bonuses up to the $55-a-month-level for the first three months, or until I fill up the first ten spots, whichever comes later. So, if I fill up the first ten spots this week I am still going to give the first ten people the extra bonuses, for the next three months. So, hope that’s clear, I keep changing the terms on this and extending them and making then better, just because I am really excited about Patreon, and I really want to give you guys a lot of help and support in there.

So, excited about Patreon, and the things that I do in there will probably be shifting as my focus shifts. So, the focus of this podcast will of course change. The name of the podcast is definitely going to change, I was brainstorming some titles the other day, when I was chatting with my friend Joanna Hennon. We came up with some ideas that I liked, but nothing is quite feeling right yet. I think it is because I am not super clear on my path forward. So, for now, this is still the Business Mindset Podcast, but I am not going to be talking about business as much if at all, I am still not sure. Mindset is still important to me, the mindset work that I do has changed my life, so I will probably be talking about mindset in some form or another on this podcast. And, I will still from time to time be offering mindset sessions with people but probably only to existing clients, Patreon people, and people in my list. I won’t be promoting it on my website I will just make some spots open from time-to-time because writing is my top priority even though I love the mindset sessions.

So, again, I don’t know where this is going, I don’t know where the podcast is going, I think it is going to be very writing focussed, nature focussed, perhaps mindset focussed, I don’t know, we shall see. I really appreciate you listening to this podcast, subscribing to the podcast, and just kind of allowing me to be in your ear every week. As I am going through these changes I want to make sure that the podcast episodes that I am putting out are useful and interesting and not just space-filling crap.

Changes behind the scenes

So, in my efforts to make this interesting useful to you I also wanted to share what these changes have been like from behind the scenes and I think this feels really abrupt to people and I actually did get some messages from people saying: I hope this isn’t an impulse decision, don’t do something you are going to regret, that kind of thing. But even though it sounded really impulsive because it just came out from nowhere, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, boom, boom, boom I announced in different places that stuff is changing, but this really has been going on behind the scenes for quite some time.

I think on Monday or Tuesday, I think it was Tuesday, I was going through my old journals, particularly my journal from earlier this year, and looking at all the stuff that I had written in there, in terms of making changes in my life and making writing a priority, I want to read you through some of this. I can’t believe that I am reading my journal to you on the podcast – this is a bit personal, but I think it is going to be useful to you because this is my deep inner stuff that I had been writing about and I had forgotten about because I didn’t take action it. I think this was all kind of bubbling under the surface, until it reached the point where now is the time, this week was the time and it happened. So let me just grab my journal and I can go through some of the stuff as far back ago as March, so I was writing about change: Become a full-time writer whose books bring in a steady income. I was yearning to have the freedom of becoming a full-time author with a substantial income, because while I do get royalty payments every month, it is not enough to replace other stuff that I do in terms of income streams. So, I wrote down what I need to do: write once a week, respect the Fridays and replace Friday’s with another day if something comes up. I blocked out Fridays in my calendar to write and this is in addition to my monthly workcation weekends. So, I blocked out Fridays in my calendar to write, but it wasn’t happening, I never managed to make it happen.

And as I moved through the year I started listening to this podcast, it is a podcast called The Three-Day Work Week, and I was interviewed for this podcast a couple of months ago, it hasn’t gone live yet, but I will share it with you when it does, but this woman Kaitlin who does the podcast The Three Day Work Week, talks a lot about A/B weeks, so you do for example, she works on her business one week and then in her business the other week. So, one week she is seeing clients and the next week she is doing marketing and sales and content creation. And I loved the idea of that. And so my plan was to do A/B weeks with my business, and that never worked. So, I have just put in my calendar to do A/B days, so one day I am working on stuff and the next day I am writing. We are going to see how that works. This is a new thing that I am going to be trying, starting next week, and we will see how it goes. In addition to my monthly workcations, because workcations are where I get the bulk of my writing done; but, since writing is going to be the focus of what I do from now on, once-a-month workcations that’s not going to be enough, so I need to add more things. So I am adding two days a week, we will see how that goes. I will update you because I know a lot of people listening to this are writers or want to be writers, or are writing a book, or dream of writing a book, so I think it is probably useful for me to talk to you about how what works for me, what doesn’t work for me, because that may be useful to you. Of course everyone has their own method of writing, you have got to find what works for you and I think it does help to hear what works for other people. So, those Fridays never happened, now it is going to be I think it is Tuesday and Thursday, we will see how that goes.

Now, the next thing I had written down was to release new additions of my top-selling books, so that’s my South Downs Wey book, and my Business Beliefs book, those are on hold now because my tree book is my number one priority, my gut tells me that, and I know this is the most important book that I need to be working on right now. So, I have a bunch of other stuff written here, looking through it I can see it has all come from the head. It is very much head-driven, logically this is what I want, this is what I need to do, and I think in the background my gut was saying: do the tree book. And it was speaking so loudly that I have this pink piece of paper stuck to my desk lamp that says: no. 1 priority tree book.

So, anyway, I was clear on this stuff, as far back as March and April. Now I am kind of paging through my journal as I do this. I have got another page where I actually looked at, because this had come up in a session with Cara, back in April, about quitting my business and quitting the business stuff and quitting the mindset stuff. And on 16 April I have a thing in my journal saying: If I formally shut down my business to focus on my writing what would that look like? And I had a whole list of things to do and quit: quit this, quit that, change the website, remove ‘work with me’ from the website, rewrite the home page, rewrite the ‘about’ page, and I didn’t do any of this stuff until this week.

And, I think for a while I used this, and by a while I mean like half-a-day, once I discovered this week that I had written all this stuff months ago, I used it to feel a little bit bad about myself. I had this clarity months ago, but I didn’t take the action on it, why didn’t I take action on it, was I lazy? No, I don’t think I was lazy, because a I do stuff that is useful and productive all the time, so it was not like I was sitting back and doing nothing, but I think emotionally I wasn’t ready for it. And I have done so much mindset stuff, in the past five years, but this year I have done a lot of work on stuff and I have made some breakthroughs in some of the personal stuff that I was struggling with in my life and one of those things is physical stuff.

So if you are interested in the blog post I wrote, I will link to it in the show notes, about my lifestyle changes and my weight, two of the things that were really affecting my personal life were my weight, because I developed a thyroid problem about nine years ago, gained a bunch of weight and have suffered from low energy levels. I felt so restricted over the last few years, because I love to be active and I am active to some extent but not as much as I would like to be. And I just felt really, really, restricted by that and I felt unhappy with my weight and unhappy with my energy levels. And so that’s something that I have been working on a lot in addition to the business mindset stuff that I do on myself. But the weight and the energy levels have been a big, big, thing for me, for the last nine years, and I finally made some changes in my diet and in the ways, I eat that have allowed me to start feeling amazing in terms of energy and have allowed me to start losing weight.

So, physically I feel fantastic, and I think as my body is decluttering this extra weight, I think that has allowed me to declutter things, other things, that don’t serve me in my life or aren’t right for me in my life, mainly the business. I had been wanting to write and focus on my writing, and yet I still felt like I had to keep running this business full-time. Again, I love doing the mindset sessions with people, I love helping people with this stuff, but that’s not what I want to be doing full-time. I want to be writing most of my time and on occasion helping people with mindset stuff. And, I think I am finally at the place, I am finally at the place, because I completely decluttered my website of all the stuff that talked about business mindset. So, I am finally at the place where I can do that, I can let go of this thing that I have been building and just allow myself to write and to shift my focus onto a different type of work.

I think one of the reasons, I am just flipping through my journal as I talk, that I didn’t take action earlier, because I got so obsessed with the house which I know you have heard me talk about on this podcast, so you probably know what I am talking about, if not it is the house I do still want to buy in Avebury. So, I got really, really, obsessed with that, and I got really obsessed with manifesting the house and making it happen and that distracted me, that was my focus for a good couple of months and that house shows up in my journal right after all of this change stuff showed up in March and April.

So, I think I am just not capable on focussing on too many things at once. The house was a massive, massive source of focus for me and I think that required so much of my energy that I didn’t have the energy to make big changes in my life and business and so I just conveniently forgot about them. I literally forgot about some of the stuff I journaled about about making big changes in my business, I had forgotten about them until this week when Is started flipping through some of the journals I have got to see what was going on for me and I was absolutely shocked especially when I found that page of all the practical action stuff I needed to do to let go of my business and make changes.

I think I am rambling, I don’t usually do this on the podcast, I usually like to have a really closed structure, to set up my bullet points and write the show notes before I get started and then adapt them as I am doing the podcast and talking about extra things and other things. And so this is actually kind of uncomfortable for me, on the one hand I think this is really useful for you to hear, on the other hand, the lack of structure kind of freaks me out. So, full disclosure here with how I am feeling about this episode and how I am feeling about things to come.

Heart Centred Energy Work

I think this is also going to allow me time to focus again on my heart-centred-energy work, not just one-to-one sessions, but actually teaching the process, which is something that I had intended to do, I had intended to start teaching workshops and training people in heart-centred-energy work in the fall of last year. So, a year ago and that did not happen. I wasn’t ready for it. I actually created a whole website on heart-centred-energy work, and the three different levels and how I was going to teach it and I never made the website live, because I realised that I wasn’t ready to be doing that. And I have since got a very clear intuitive nudge to write a book teaching people to use heart-centred-energy work, more to use with themselves than to use to see clients.

I really do want to teach people in a workshop if they are going to be using the process with other people. But I have a very clear intuitive nudge that I need to write a book on this so that might be the next book after the tree book, I don’t know, I have got so many ideas for books which are totally unrelated to business and unrelated to mindset stuff. I have got a lot of books, not a lot but a few books in mind which are kind of like the tree book which is kind of a channeled book, I have got ideas for fiction, which scares the crap out of me. There are a couple of really clear ideas I have for fiction books, novels, that again scare the shit out of me, they might happen next year, they might happen after that. I don’t know, but I know that it is something that I need to try.

Feedback

So, I think I am going to wrap it up here, I hope you found this episode useful. I really get good feedback, like I said, on my newsletters when I open up and pour my heart out and tell you some of the crap that has been going on for me in my business and life, so I decided that I would give it a try on the podcast.

So, please let me know what you thought of this, was this useful, is it useful to hear the stuff that is going on behind the scenes for me? Is is useful for you to hear the story of how I have been making changes, because I feel like I have been talking about like big business transitions for over a year now, and it has just now really happening. I am such an impatient person and I love it when things happen fast, like they have this week. And it is so hard for me not to beat myself up over the fact that I have been talking about making this change for a year. So, that’s what it is like for me, I absolutely know that I am on the right track, I absolutely know that this is what I need to be focussing on. So, here we are.

So, I don’t know what I will be talking about this week, I don’t know what is up for the future of this podcast, you may have some random topics for a while as I work my way through this. So, thank you for listening, I really, really, appreciate it, I really appreciate all the support I have gotten this week in terms of my change.

Please drop me a line and let me know what you thought about this my email is: [email protected] or you can get in touch online and let me know. Also, I would love to see you on Patreon, if you head to: http://HollyWorton.com/Patreon, you can join me there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to content that I won’t be sharing anywhere else, including my Facebook group which will be closing. I do a monthly Q&A where you can ask me pretty much anything and I will answer your questions including all kinds of stuff done-for-you Heart-Centred-Energy-work and PSCYH-K. So, http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton, I would love to see you in there.

And remember to visit https://www.hollyworton.com/273 for the show notes on this episode. Thanks again.