#583: The Turning Point

Flow Dreaming. It's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. It is the feeling that you bring forward. It is your emotional connection that really sets the tone for what is going to be happening to you and for you. And you know that feeling, when you touch it, it just spreads through you. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hey, friends. I'm glad you're here with me today. And we're moving forward, plunging forward, with our new format for Flow Dream, where I talk to you just a little more personally about my life and how I live it, my mindset, as I move through my days. It probably goes without saying at this point, yes, I have done a lot. If you don't know my history, oh, well, you've got hundreds of episodes to go. Figure it out, I guess. But I won't put you through that torture. Instead, I'll just say this. I have worked for 20 years in publishing and have worked. I worked for Hay House for 10 years. I built Hay House Radio for them. I was in charge of their entire new media division. We did some of the first webinars on the entire Internet. Yes, it's crazy. I feel so old saying it now, but I was so fortunate there that I was also tutored, mentored by Louise Hay, my boss, Reed Tracy, also my boss, direct boss, my. My co host, Dr. Wayne Dyer, for five years on air on our weekly radio program. At the time, of course, I was kind of young and senseless. I'm sorry, but I was. And I didn't really understand what all this was for, why I had been born with the gifts I was given. The ability to make content, to think strategically, to also be empathic, to have this very rich psychic, intuitive lineage that I came from. It all kind of finally came together at some point for me. And that's when I realized that the universe had pretty much invested in me, right? It had invested in me. The universe invests in all of us. It gives us all of our life experiences, and some seem, you know, great and wonderful. There's always someone, by the way, who's going to seem better than you. Mine sounds amazing, but I look at other people and I think, oh, I wish I could have theirs. Theirs is even more amazing. You can't get away from that. So look to your own. Look to your own and discover what have I been prepared for? What have I been tutored for? What have I been mentored for? And maybe you've been mentored through hardship, or maybe you've been mentored through blessings, or a combination of both, certainly, as I have. But it all came to a kind of screeching realization a couple of weeks ago. I know that's strange. So we're gonna delve into that today in our episode number five, 83, the Turning Point. And indeed, things are turning. And I've been a slow ship to turn because that's how I am. I turn slowly. I kind of edge in a new direction a little bit. And I kind of feel the wind. Is this going to work? And then I finally sigh, let it out and breathe. And I think I'm heading into that. I know myself well enough to know how I personally adjust through change, which is something I wish on all of us, all of you to know yourself well enough to know when you're at each particular change point and how you face each one inside yourself. So I'm going to back up here. What happened? Ah, well, I was in a trip. I went to Washington, D.C. with my family. It's a trip that I had wanted to go through for a few years. Go through. Go on. Prior to being diagnosed with stage two invasive breast cancer. Actually, we had a couple of trips lined up for our family. We had a trip to Japan and we had a trip to Washington lined up. And when I was diagnosed three years ago, they all just kind of went off the table. And so I vowed, hey, when I get better, when I am healed, we're going to go. So last year we went to Japan. This year we went to Washington, D.C. and I hauled the kids through all of the national landmarks, you know, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House and the Library of Congress. We even went to the. We even went to the Supreme Court and just stared through the little peephole at where the justices sit, very far away at the end of the room, we could barely see. I got us into the White House. We got to tour the East Wing. It was. It was pretty awesome. And sometimes right about when I was there, right before I got there, maybe it was on the plane ride, I can't really remember exactly when something happened inside me where I just. You know that feeling where something clicks and you just shift into a new realization and you know, maybe because I had done so much planning. So, you know that I have Flow dreaming dot com. That's my main company, my main offer to the world, my main teaching. And Flow Dreaming encompasses me. School, of course. And then this year I also opened up a kind of, you know, side company to that, which is inflowradio.com and I opened that because I really just wanted partners who would join me in the game of podcasting. The fun of reaching out and getting in more people's ears and kind of spreading the messages and spreading the word. So I opened up this podcast broadcast network, and that's what I've been doing all year, you know, January through what, November or October, whatever it was here. And I was preparing to go on this trip to Washington, and I was looking at all my social media accounts and, you know, adding them up. Gosh, I've got like 12 or 13 of them. And I just started to think, that's a lot for one person. That's a lot. And I thought, well, why am I thinking of it as just one person? It's for two companies, of course they have that much. But I said, but I still feel like I am one person spreading myself thin into the two companies social media accounts. Well, I should have social media people doing this for me full time. Well, I don't. I'm doing it. I'm leading the message. It's important to me that when you hear about something I'm thinking about or doing or making, it's coming from me. So all of this is jumbling around in my brain as I'm sitting there on the airplane and I've got my two kids with me and they're fighting over who gets the window seat. And we had to do all their homework on the plane because of course, I took them out of school for a week and on and on and on. And it dawns on me. I don't actually have an account for just me. I have a Flow Dreaming account on Facebook. I have a Summer McStravik account on Facebook, an Inflow Radio account on Facebook and on Instagram, I had an Inflow Radio account. I had a Flow Dreaming account. But the Summer Mixtraffic account, even on Facebook, was, let's just be honest, sorely underused. Sorely under. Little. Little time is spent because for so many years, I've been focused on, I have a message, I have a teaching, I have a technique. I have something that will help you and improve you. And that is what I've put myself behind for 13, no, 14 solid years since my first book came out, Flow Dreaming. And then when I started Inflow Radio, I again said, okay, well, this is the platform. This is the place where you guys are all going to go and discover the best personal growth podcasts and live radio programs on the Internet. So who's still missing in this whole combination? And that's when it hit me. Me. I'm missing. Well, why am I missing? Why do I have, like, 12, 13 social media accounts? Pinterest, Twitter. I mean, all of them, right? Every time a new one pops up, you have this feeling like, oh, I better try that one. You know, I better get there next. But where was my voice? Where is my voice? Even in my podcast, I discovered, oh, I'm always talking about flow dreaming. I'm always talking about something to benefit you that's outside me or something. Yes, I created, but I can stand behind that thing I created because I have confidence in what's come through me. I have confidence in flow dreaming and the technique and that it works and it changes people. But do I have confidence in me? Do I think you'd even want to know me? Would you want to hang out with me? Do you think I'm interesting? Am I fascinating? Or am I just the person who is studiously at work, the little mouse behind the computer putting everything out for, you know, for. For this bigger message? That's. That's what hit me. I mean. I mean, it slammed into me like a. Like a truck in my thinking, how come I'm not showing up? How come I am not being seen? After all these years of teaching everyone else how to be seen? And, yeah, Flow dreaming is me. It is me. I have been seen in a big way. I'm. That's. That's what I talk about and how I show up. And every time I get on a stage and I speak to people and I lead a retreat, I'm being seen. I'm the messenger. But the message has been flow Dreaming. I'll tell you how this came to me, how I started to think about, maybe it's gonna be about me. And I'm sharing this with you because maybe you need things to be about you, too. And I think maybe this is a little more difficult for people who are over 40 because we didn't grow up in the 80s and 90s with this influencer generation, which is. It's about you. Basically, you show up, you put makeup on, and you're instantly fascinating. I have a daughter who's 15, and I look at her watching these vlogs And I remember once I was watching her. She was. I was watching her. She was watching YouTube and it was a vlogger on, which is a video blogger. And this woman had gone out grocery shopping, and she was pulling the things out of her bag that she had bought at the grocery store. And I was dumbfounded. I'm like, lexi, are we literally watching a woman pull stuff out of her grocery bag on YouTube? Is this all we can be doing with our time right now? And she said, but, Mom, I follow her. And I'm like, what? How is this even remotely interesting? But it was interesting because it was part of this woman's story. It was part of who she was, how she lives, how she thinks, how she is inside the world. And I puzzled on that for so long because that's not how I was sort of brought up. Things were interesting. People were interesting if they were movie stars, you know, but otherwise just a regular person, you know, undoing their groceries or snapping pictures of themselves in interesting locations, who cares? But things have changed. The world has become more intimate, our interaction with each other, while it's also become more distant because, like, we don't know each other. And yet you can follow other people you don't know, right? It's not the days of the phone call where you. If you are interested in someone's life, you had to call them and talk with them about it. Now you can just watch them from afar. Yes, it's more distant, but it's also more intimate because people don't stand behind their brands. They are the brand. Are you interested in me? Are you interested in my life? Are you interested in how I think? Do you want to follow what I do? Because what I do and what I am is perhaps something you would like to model, you would like to be as well. So this all kind of hit me on the plane, hit me in Washington, D.C. and I said, okay, I'm going to start a summer McStravic Instagram site. So I started it. It was very easy to set up. Like, took me 10 minutes. And then I went, oh, holy crap, what am I going to put on here? Because instantly, I also wanted to fill it up with all my flow dreaming stuff, right? All of my empathic intuition stuff, all the stuff I've taught and shown and given over the years. But I realized, no, no, no, no. I already have sites for that. This is about me. So if I'm going to show up in this site, who am I going to be? How am I going to be intimate? How am I going to show people this is who I am. Do you like me? If you like me, follow me. It just took it to an entirely different level. A whole different level. And I gotta say, I was kind of lost. I still am a little bit lost in this because, you know, I've looked around and like, does anybody know what they're doing on Instagram? Turns out everybody does. I'm like, five years too late. Okay, all right, fine, I'll suck that down. That's okay. But I'm not the person who sits around and gets all these, you know, photography settings and gets all the mood and the lighting and all the colors just right, and all the pale pastels, all the popular stuff that's out there right now. On how to have a great Instagram account, I'm the person who says, I'm gonna post pictures of my garden and my beautiful smell candles and some crystals that I think are super cool. And, you know, the statues I post in my house and the beautiful things I surround myself with. And I'm gonna think about things. I'm gonna put a picture up and I'm gonna tell you what I think about as I do this. And it's still taking me some time because it's me who's showing up. Do you guys see what I'm saying? It's not my message. Flow Dreaming is very easy to talk to you about, but me? Why would I be interesting or fascinating? It's unknown. I haven't done it before. You might think I'm super, super boring. You may have no interest. And that's the level of intimacy I'm talking about. That's what I mean by putting yourself completely on the line. Because I'd always told myself I'm not a celebrity, I'm not interesting, nobody'd want to hear about me and what I've done. I'm only gonna say what I've done to give myself some credibility so that you guys know I know what I'm talking about when I'm sharing with you how to build your business and how to flow dream and how to co create and manifest and make millions of dollars. I'm telling you about me so you know that I've done these things and I can help you do these things too. Too. But that was the purpose, just for credibility, not because I wanted you to come to a feeling about me. I didn't really care what you thought about me other than you knew I knew what I was talking about. Now with this new paradigm, with this Instagram, with the way the world is Today, it's more than just, do I know what I'm talking about? It's personal. And I'm showing up personally, and I find myself on Instagram, you know, thinking, should I post this? Do they want to know this about me? Maybe they don't want to know this about me. Maybe they don't want to know that I had the most fabulous cocktail in this downtown, you know, restaurant with my husband. Right. Isn't that what people post, cocktails and cats? That's right. So I think maybe they don't want to know, but I have to what? And this always leads me right back to my message. Get over myself. If you have a message, if you have something to truly share with the world, you have to get over yourself. And I feel like I finally clicked and got it, and I can drop into the next level of getting over myself, which means now I'm going to post things. If you like them, fantastic. You know, hit like, or heart or, I don't know, whatever you do on Instagram right now. But I have to just be me and let the chips fall where they lay and not worry that if you don't like me, you won't like my message. That's another thing that I've divorced myself from. Used to have a thought. You won't like what I'm teaching you unless, you know, I make sure that I'm nice and vanilla and you don't know that I'm kind of political and liberal and, you know, that I'm breast cancer survivor. You know, all the stuff that I'm in and I'm into and I go deep in, you know, intuitive readings, crazy stuff I do with my mom. I thought, well, you know, that's me. But flow dreaming is something else, I guess. And, you know, this whole show, this whole episode is kind of telling right now because I always go off on tangents. But you can tell this is a hard one for me because I don't have a real true focus for what I'm trying to express other than sharing with you my discomfort and yet my deep desire to push through this discomfort. It's an example to all of you who have been in me school, who have followed flow dreaming. This is an example of what happens when you hit a ceiling. When you get above the ceiling, you stop playing around where you've been in and you get above it and you see a new view. You don't know what you're doing. You feel uncertain, you feel a little lost. You question. And so this is the example of that and that's why I'm sharing this with you right now, so you can see it in action as it's happening. I'm going to give you me in my new Instagram profile. And I'm experiencing the second guessing, the will they like me or who would care about that? Like, I'm not a celebrity, I'm just a person. But maybe what I like, you'll like. Maybe where I my interests are, your interests will be. Maybe when I discover something I enjoy and I share it with you, you'll enjoy it too. That's what I'm kind of hoping for. And even expressing that means I'm hoping for something. It's like a relationship. You know when you talk to someone that you care about and you're like, are you ready to go the next level? It's a, you know, you gotta take a breath for that. Because what if they say, no, no, I don't like you enough to really just date you. Only you. I'm not asking you to date me. Only me. Right. But what I'm saying is the next level is I'm going to show you what I like. I'm going to show you what my world looks like and what I'm into and invite you to look at some of the same things with me. Which includes flow dreaming, it includes in flow radio, it includes all my interests. My interests in beauty and art and personal power and inner strength. My interests in pushing myself into realms of uncertainty and insecurity. Just like this one. Because if I can't do this as a teacher, as a leader, I can never ask you to do it as a student. So that's what this one is all about. This is the turning point. This is leaping to the next level. This is the ceiling is broken and I don't know where I am. And I hope I figure it out. And if no one follows me and likes me, just talking about me in my life, so be it. I'm okay with that too. And if they do and I discover that there is a whole new world for me, I'm going to look too there. Because, you know, the world is changing, Models are changing, things are changing. Coaching is changing, mentoring is changing, personal growth is changing, social media is changing. It's always, always changing. The key really is to keep swimming in the newer waters. Swim in those places you haven't been in before and not to be afraid of them. Or if you are afraid, do it anyway. Just like I'm doing today in this kind of just Honest conversation podcast episode, which is Also a break for me, a new thing for me. So I would love your feedback. I would love it on Instagram. I would love it on my website, Facebook, or, excuse me, on Facebook and my website if you can find a place. Probably my blog. Right? I'm probably blogging about this, too. I'd love it in my inbox. Summerlowdreaming.com Let me know what you think. And I guess I want to wrap up with just telling you. I think what I'm feeling isn't just me. I think it's universal. I think there are a lot of us who feel overwhelmed by all the social media, all the places we have to show up. We feel overwhelmed by representing the companies we work for and the job roles we have versus who are our personal selves and this blurred line, this distinction between the two that is kind of getting eroded and erased. I think a lot of us are feeling overwhelmed and just not sure how to show up and where to show up. And we're just piecing it together. And if that's you, then I'm expressing it with you. And we're in solidarity because it really is a little bit faster and quicker and more speeded up and more something than it's ever been before. So my commitment now is to show up to you as Summer McStravic, for better or worse, give or take, like or hate. And of course, I'm still showing up with Flow Dreaming and Inflow Radio. I want you to think yourself, how are you showing up? Are you hiding behind anything? Are you not fully expressing? Are you creating a partition or a divide in your life between you and everything you do and everything you are? And if that's the case, I don't know, I invite you to also start bulldozing it, see what happens. Right? It's going to come right into you. It's going to come right into your heart, into your feelings about, do they like me? Who am I? Is this relevant? Is this interesting enough? Who cares? Does anyone care? And that's the next level of question I think all of us have to answer. I think that's the only way we get out of fomo. Right? Fear of missing out and comparing is if we just go in and own it. And I recognize even as I express this, it's not completely a thought that's fully realized yet, but it's tugging on that. So that's how I'm going to wrap up today's episode of Flow Dreaming and I'm gonna invite you to listen to a little bit. I have to say about me school. And then I'm gonna invite you to rate my podcast and then I'm gonna invite you to listen to whatever next upcoming episode I have, and we'll just see where things go. Love you guys. Really do. So I have a really important me school. You've heard me talk about it, mention it, and I'm just wondering when it might be a fit for you, when you might jump to the next level, which is going from maybe listening to the flow dreams and playing with them or listening to this podcast and saying there is a next point from here. And I've been kind of playing around the same area for quite a while and I'm ready, ready to see what else there is. And maybe you're nervous and scared. You don't know how much it costs. You don't know what happens there. You don't know what will happen for you there. Look, don't be. Just don't be scared. Me school is the most beautiful thing I think I have made in my life. But it's the most beautiful thing because I take you, really you people, just like you, into the program. And I take all the learning that I have been blessed with, that I have been mentored with, and I have been mentored and blessed with some pretty amazing people in my life. And my job is to carry this information forward, to then pass it on to you. And what we pass on is how to live well, how to be you, authentically you, how to live into who you are, who you came here to be, how to find that, how to move through your ceilings and blocks and blossom. You know, you're probably looking at this next big chunk of your life and wondering what's going to be there? What's going to be in it? Is it going to be the same as it was before? Well, for it to be different, you need to start choosing yourself. You need to invest in yourself. You need to invest in your growth. You need to consciously say, I'm ready. It's time. I'm ready. Now. That's what we do in MI school. We spend that time and that's what we look at. Personal power, your ability to generate wealth, security, time, freedom. We look at your emotional self. Are you in love with yourself? Are you in love with life? If you're not, let's make that happen. It's just a question of whether you say yes or whether you say no yet again. So jump on over to my website, flowdreaming.com and you'll find there a link, a button, an image, there'll be something where you can learn more about me school and set up a time to talk with me and we will get you going. I'll share and answer all of your questions and hopefully be able to start working with you as you discover what your life is really there for and how it really wants to show up for you. So right now go to flowdreaming.com and just get your time scheduled for us to talk and think about mi school and where you're going next. Just get it done. It's past time and now let's get back to our show. That's a wrap for today, but if you want to keep things going, then download my free Flow Dreaming apps. That's right, there's two of them. The first app allows you to listen to this podcast anywhere you want on your mobile device, as well as search and favorite episodes. The other app hooks you up with my Manifesting Store, which includes an oracle to help you see what direction you most are in need of right now and advice. You can also sample all kinds of Flow dreams and put together a library of your own. So to find these apps, just search Flow Dreaming in itunes or on your Google App Store.